[OrangeMonkey]

What is up with the 'custom coffee brands' that seem to be pushed nonstop the last 6 months?

It seems like every youtuber that I watch now has their own coffee brand that they ask you to buy. Heck - a vtuber rabbit was pushing their coffee brand too. Did I just miss the memo?

[superfrank]

Super easy to white label on demand and hard for most people to measure actual quality, would be my guess.

I assume there's some company out there that is basically drop shipping coffee and it's all coming from the same place with different branding. It probably costs the youtubers almost nothing to set up and the drop shipping company does everything and then forwards some percentage of the sale to the youtuber so it just runs on auto pilot. It's easy money if you already have an established brand.

[status200]

This is a bit of conjecture on my part, but I see many "entrepreneurs" who go on vacation or otherwise encounter the large margin from exploitable cheap labor on cloud forest crops like coffee and chocolate (palm oil and others as well), and cannot resist setting up a co-packing operation and using their network to shoehorn it into grocery stores or shill it to their followers. It is a relatively easy "wealth expansion" play if you are decent at marketing or already have an audience.

There is a large spectrum from slave-owning cacao operations to fair trade and regenerative operations, but for sure the margin is a part of the draw.

[UtopiaPunk]

There's a business model where a company makes generic products, like coffee or water bottles, and then puts your brand on it for a small fee. They also handle storing and shipping the inventory. So a business or "entrepreneur" can sell what looks like an original product with little investment. They just need a good website and an audience in order to exploit the cheap labor of workers living in poor countries.

Does it make the world any better? Absolutely not. But it's a way to make a buck.

[jabroni_salad]

It's easy print-on-demand merchandise (you dont have to worry about warehousing or any other logistic factor) and is more interesting than the usual POD goods like tshirts and acrylic pins.