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Good Energy found in an unexpected place

Cascara soda — brewed from the coffee fruit, not the bean.

The Beginning

I'd spent a decade in specialty coffee before I found it on the other side of the world. A café in Melbourne was serving cascara as an iced tea, and it sold out every day before lunch.

It was better than I expected. Naturally sweet, more complex than any iced tea I'd had, cut with a homemade syrup that knew when to stop. I already knew what cascara was. What I didn't know was why I'd never seen it used this way at home.

The more I read, the stranger that seemed. Cascara is a superfruit and a byproduct at the same time, and it had only just been classified as a novel food here, so almost nothing had been built with it. So I took it to the food scientists at Queen Margaret University, and we developed the two flavours you see today.

The Potential

Every coffee bean grows inside a fruit. Cascara is that fruit. The skin and pulp around the seed, dried once the bean is taken out. It tastes of red berries and hibiscus, with a tartness closer to rosehip than to coffee.

And it isn't a new idea. It has been brewed for centuries in coffee-growing regions. What changed is the export trade: an industry built around shipping the bean treated everything around it as waste, and most of the fruit has been discarded ever since. Approved for sale in Europe and the UK only in 2022, it is still almost unused here.

That is where our name comes from. In an industry organised entirely around the bean, cascara is the outlier — the part that never fit the model, and the part we built everything on.

It uses a crop that is already grown
no new land, no new planting, nothing farmed specifically for us
It takes a disposal problem off the farm
fruit that was left to rot or burn becomes something worth shipping
It pays for the same harvest twice
growers earn from the fruit as well as the bean they already sell
It is a superfruit by any measure
naturally occurring caffeine, polyphenols, dietary fibre and minerals

Why Cascara

Cascara is a superfruit. Everything below is already naturally in the coffee cherry.

  • Natural Caffeine

    Naturally present in the fruit, topped up from the coffee plant to 80mg a can. Never synthetic.

  • Polyphenols

    Rich in antioxidants — chlorogenic acid, gallic acid and flavonoids from the cherry skin.

  • Fibre

    Soluble and insoluble dietary fibre, present because the fruit is present.

  • Minerals

    Potassium, magnesium, calcium, sodium and iron, drawn up by the plant.

We're describing cascara as an ingredient here. See the nutritional information for what's in the can.

From Cherry to Can

Simpler than you'd think and every step uses something that already existed.

  1. The cherry is picked

    Coffee is harvested as a fruit. The bean everyone knows is the seed at the centre of it.

  2. The bean is removed

    The seed goes off to be roasted and sold as coffee. What's left is the skin and pulp around it.

  3. The fruit is dried

    Rather than being discarded, the fruit is dried into cascara. Stable, storable, ready to be steeped.

  4. It's steeped

    Cascara is infused much like a tea, drawing out the colour, the caffeine and the stone-fruit character.

  5. Blended with real fruit

    The infusion is balanced with real fruit and nothing that doesn't need to be there. Eight ingredients in total.

  6. Canned in the UK

    Developed with Food Scientists at Queen Margaret University, and canned here in the UK.

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