The Story Behind The World’s First Canned Sparkling Coffee Fruit Tea

The explosion of ready-to-drink canned cocktails has been well documented over the past year. But technically speaking, the RTD market also encompasses many entries in the rapidly expanding non-alcoholic segment. And this month we get a glimpse of how worthwhile some of those booze-free offerings can be. Husky is a sparkling example—a new upcycled beverage brand that makes use of coffee fruit extract.

The company was founded by Crawford Hawkins, a successful hedge-fund manager that abandoned his former life to take up residency on a coffee farm in Colombia. “On the farm I discovered two extraordinary things,” he tells Forbes. “One — there are tremendous inequities in the coffee supply chain. And two, an enormous amount of coffee byproducts are wasted every year.”

After returning to the US in 2019 he set out to address that first problem first, conceiving of a tipping platform in which coffee drinkers could tip a coffee farmer halfway across the globe. But before that concept could get off the ground, a global pandemic froze development.

“I needed to pivot, but I wanted to maintain our original mission, so I turned to coffee byproducts for the solution,” he recalls of Husky’s genesis. “I bought 200 pounds of organic coffee husk, pulled out the Sodastream, and got to work with my co-founder in a small West Village apartment.”

A little more on that husk, which also lends the product its name: in South America, where it is known locals as cascara, it’s typically discarded by coffee bean harvesters. But the edible casing also happens to be nutrient dense and full of its own sort of vibrant flavor. Hawkins’ goal was to create a new profit channel for financially-stressed farmers while also mitigating food waste. And he’s doing it on the front end as well as the back end. Two percent of all of Husky’s sales are donated directly to partner farms located across Costa Rica, Colombia, Honduras, and Brazil.

According to Hawkins, the product isn’t just good for the earth, it also holds untold virtue for those who consume it. “With all of the coffee people consume, I quickly realized the irony that most don’t know much about it,” he explains. “Coffee fruit has incredible health benefits. It is rich in antioxidants; it contains plant polyphenols that are anti-inflammatory and fight certain cancers. And my favorite: it stimulates the production of BDNF in the brain that has been shown to improve memory and mood.”

As an added side-bonus, Husky is also highly quaffable. Lightly-caffeinated and owning a gentle effervescence, it provides an apt medium upon which its fruity palate can emerge. It arrives on shelves in three initial flavors: lemon, orange, and grapefruit. Each provides only the distant echo of coffee’s tannic bitterness. Now available nationwide, Husky retails for around $14 per 6-pack of 12 oz. cans.