With its own joltin’ joe, vendor comes on strong

Posted by Dave and Dennis on September 15th, 2005 at 10:43pm

Shock Coffee specializes in drinks that are super-loaded with caffeine.

By Lauren Scott
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

Jeffrey Rosen’s laid-back personality is reflected in his daily work attire: jeans and a casual shirt.

While Rosen is calm and collected, his business is making people bounce off the walls.

Last October Rosen bought Shock Coffee, maker of hyper- caffeinated coffee drinks.

Shock Coffee contains 200 milligrams of caffeine in a six-ounce cup, which Rosen said is 50 percent more than the average cup of coffee brewed in convenience stores. The energy drink Red Bull contains 80 milligrams of caffeine.

The company does not alter the roasting process to boost caffeine content. Instead it chooses coffee beans with higher caffeine content to give Shock Coffee the extra kick, said Rosen.

“No matter what anyone tells you, caffeine comes from the beans, not the roasting process,” Rosen said.

The content of Shock Coffee is secret. The company will say only that it uses a mix of Robusta and Arabica beans.

Shock Coffee makes three products: hot coffee, cold coffee packaged in eight-ounce cans, and Shock-A-Lots, edible chocolate-covered coffee beans. Convenience stores typically sell Shock Coffee for 25 to 50 cents more than the cost of an average store brew, Rosen said.

The idea to buy Shock hit Rosen while he was vice president of sales at Queens, N.Y.-based Price Master Corp., a nationwide distributor of convenience and dollar-store merchandise.

Rosen wondered why Price Master did not sell coffee along with cigarettes and gasoline, the top three sellers in convenience stores.

“I realized coffee is too much of a competitive market. I knew we needed a niche,” Rosen said.

It started with a gimmick

Using his past experience selling YJ Stinger, an energy drink, for Price Master, Rosen came up with a gimmick. “The word ‘energy’ came to mind and ‘coffee,’ and I put the words together,” Rosen said.

An Internet search revealed the name of a company that made hyper-caffeinated coffee called Extreme Coffee, then being sold at 200 locations across the United States.

Price Master made an offer and bought the company. Today, Rosen is president of Shock Coffee, on sale in more than 3,000 stores nationwide.

Convenience stores and coffee shops in college towns around Texas State University, Princeton, Brown, Harvard, the University of Rhode Island and Rutgers are lapping up Shock Coffee products. Or, as Rosen puts it, “College kids eat it up.”

Joseph F. DeRupo, spokesman for the National Coffee Association, said the group’s market research in recent years shows an increase in the number of occasional and daily coffee drinkers.

“I think it’s because consumers are starting to look at coffee in a new way,” DeRupo said. “They are looking to different coffees to fill different roles at different times of the day.”

DeRupo said different coffee types, including Shock, have a place in today’s consumer market.

“We found that Americans are responding positively to the wider options of coffee available in the marketplace and so there appears to be ample room for new and different varieties,” DeRupo said.

With its growth trend, Rosen said Shock Coffee is “positioned to be the next Red Bull of coffee.”

Under General+ Marketing