Bold flavors and quality service stir Lyger Coffee and LOCAD’s perfect mix
The first crystallized coffee brings a cosmopolitan vibe in a mini cup.
Whether you prefer the drink as drip, brewed, or pressed, the constant coffee craving in Southeast Asia and the Philippines is far from waning.
The need for a caffeine fix is expected to go full speed in the country in the next five years. Consumer spending is forecast to grow by an average of 8.1% annually, from 2022 to 2025. This percentage is made possible by the general switch of middle-income households from instant coffee to higher quality coffee.
It becomes in line with the growing trend for premium products. Five-month-old brand Lyger Coffee is joining this bustling local coffee scene with their premium mini cups of coffee. It can be delivered right to the customer’s doorstep by end-to-end fulfillment company, LOCAD.
The magic of mini cups
Craving for good quality coffee that is both convenient to drink and sophisticated gave birth to Lyger Coffee this 2022. Made from pure Arabica coffee beans from the mountains of Colombia, the first-ever crystallized coffee in the country goes through an innovative process of freeze-drying. This method of crystallization brings out the best in the coffee beans. Think of clear-cut flavors and aromas at a much higher level than regular dried coffee.
Lyger Coffee’s original team of four came up with the idea of mini cups. This support the brand’s two most important elements: convenience and class. Lyger Coffee co-founder Philipp Renner describes this pivotal moment:
“We thought about how we want to make the coffee taste really good, and we went through different options of beans. Then, you can just take these tiny cups with you wherever you go, and you just need any kind of liquid, water, or milk to make your coffee. You can use cold or hot liquid and then you have your own coffee within literally 20 seconds.”
Brewing success
Made for coffee lovers by the most exacting coffee aficionados themselves. Lyger Coffee, with its current americano and latte flavors, aims to bring world-class coffee right to the Filipinos’ fingertips. To make this happen, the Lyger team decided that, right off the bat, they would contract a fulfillment company to do the delivery. This execution would also ensure that the Lyger team would be able to focus on production, lessen overhead costs, and avoid unexpected newbie problems.
“When we started looking at the market, like who is there and who can do fulfillment—to be honest, it is quite limited. There are not many companies who can do it, and there are not many who can do it well,” Renner explained.
He got good advice when he got recommendations from his co-founder who has been in the country for years. He also knows the market very well, and has a huge network.
“LOCAD was a top referral from people we know who have already worked with them. They’ve all had very good experiences with LOCAD. It was a very easy decision for us to go with LOCAD,” he added.
LOCAD is at the helm of their orders’ logistics and delivery. Hence, the Lyger team need not monitor the status of the deliveries and can just continue with the operations. Nor do they have to worry about the complexities of fulfillment because of their reliability.
“When I say reliability, I mean that you have the certainty that orders are fulfilled within a certain amount of time that is reasonable. And by actual fulfillment time, I mean that when you book it just yesterday, most of those orders get fulfilled within the day or within every 10 hours. So that fulfillment actually happens and then the customers receive their orders within a reasonable time,” he said.
Renner also lauds LOCAD’s communication and control tower system. This allows them to quickly respond to requests and facilitate a streamlined fulfillment process.
“It’s like you have something like a perfect integration with your store online that perfectly syncs and then there’s also a way to look at it via a dashboard,” he added.
Sipping into the future
In the coming months, Lyger is set to add more items. These will allow coffee lovers to enjoy every cup even more. On top of this product expansion, the Lyger team puts great importance on sustainability in improving their products.
Together with a local NGO, Lyger has launched its Return Your Mini Cups Program. It recycles used mini cups by turning them into construction bricks. They want to encourage their patrons to join them in this advocacy. To do that, Lyger gives away freebies to those who send back 50 empty mini-cups.
The Lyger team also believes that one key to success is receiving and giving feedback. One result of listening to their customers is that they recently switched their plastic box packaging to a more sustainable recycled paper version.
At the same time, Lyger looks forward to more years of partnership with LOCAD. It has been very open to comments that will improve their logistics system.
“They are very open to feedback. They have already implemented some changes based on our feedback not just on our system but also on those of their other clients,” Renner remarked.
With their sales looking exceptionally good, Lyger is poised to venture into other Southeast Asian countries soon. This becomes similar to the path taken by LOCAD which operates in the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Australia.
