The past year of climate shocks and surging coffee prices has felt portentous. Without significant investment and industry cooperation, coffee’s future seems increasingly uncertain.
Coffee brands love to tout their ethics and human rights policies, yet the supply chain is still built on poverty. At some point, we have to judge the industry not by what it says but by its actions.
Early last year, Fresh Cup Magazine asked me to participate in a piece predicting 2024’s coffee trends. I’m not a big prognosticator, but I figured it was worth a shot. While proper industry insiders considered how AI and other nascent technologies might impact coffee, or how employment standards could change, I focused on something I’d observed while writing my weekly coffee news roundup: celebrity coffee brands.
I had witnessed a steady drip of celebrity-fronted coffee company launches, and over the coming year, I mused, “celebrity coffee brands will increase in number and get weirder”. While some of the specific details in my prediction didn’t come to pass—we have (so far) not seen the release of Casper Van Dien’s Cold Brew—it’s fair to say that celebrity coffee brands really did increase, and get increasingly strange, last year. The president of El Salvador started one, for example. Robert Downey Jr. also got in on the action with Happy Coffee, the launch of which saw him denigrate specialty coffee for no reason whatsoever.
Plenty of celebrity coffee brands seem sincere, driven by an actual love of coffee—basketball star Jimmy Butler, for example, engages meaningfully with the coffee community. Other companies are obviously transactional, just another way to profit from a famous face (looking at you, Downey Jr.). But others, well, they’re different. Sadder, more desperate.
The weirdest of the 2024 launches, a cash grab so blatant that it surely marked the nadir of the phenomenon, was Rudy Giuliani’s Rudy Coffee. A washed-up conservative micro-celebrity facing criminal indictments and desperately trying to make a buck to offset bankruptcy, Giuliani has never really seemed to actually care about coffee. You get the sense he could just as easily be selling supplements or pillows (he has, in fact, previously hawked both of those products).
As Rudy Coffee demonstrates, we seem to be scraping the barrel of what the celebrity coffee concept can achieve. Celebrity retail in general is stuttering, while low margins and stiff competition mean coffee remains a difficult industry in which to succeed. This is the case even for celebrities, unless they have a lot of investment behind them and a proper respect for coffee.
So why do celebrities keep starting these often half-baked companies? Why do we care so much? And does Rudy Coffee herald a beginning of the end for the concept?
The Three Types of Celebrity Coffee Brand
A celebrity can get involved in coffee in one of several ways: as the founder who is key to the company and its success; as a figurehead, someone whose main job is to front the project but who still has a say in its operations; or by simply licensing their image rights to give a brand or specific product a marketing boost.
The properly successful and long-lasting celebrity coffee brands are generally founded and run by someone with an obvious love for coffee: think Butler’s Bigface Coffee; YouTuber Emma Chamberlain’s Chamberlain Coffee; and Punk Bunny Coffee, neé Oakland Coffee Works, founded by the three members of Green Day. (Actor Hugh Jackman’s Laughing Man Coffee is also worth mentioning, although he sold up to Keurig Green Mountain in 2015.) These founders are intimately involved with the companies they started, and their genuine interest in coffee has helped fuel their success.
Then there are the companies that, while technically founded by a celebrity, use them more as a figurehead to raise brand awareness. Tom Hanks launched Hanx Coffee in 2022 “as a way to support Veterans and military families” but—while at least he’s not pocketing the proceeds—Hanks himself doesn’t seem very involved. As I wrote for Fresh Cup at the time, it’s unclear why Hanks would want to start a coffee company to raise money when, considering his wealth, it would be much easier to just donate directly himself.
Another example of this kind of celebrity-fronted coffee brand is Happy Coffee, co-founded by Robert Downey Jr. at the beginning of 2024. The brand, with its colourful design and multimillionaire co-founders (the other is entrepreneur Craig Dubitsky), launched with a media blitz that was weirdly aggressive and negative towards specialty coffee.
“It’s just become such a massive industry, but we realized you’re either getting stuff that tastes like pencil shavings, or you’re getting the [artisanal] stuff that was passed through the small intestine of a yak”, Downey Jr. told People Magazine. Dubitsky riffed on this theme: “We didn’t want to be, we made up this word, baristacrats. We didn’t want to be snobby”.
The pitch from these companies is usually cheerful and beneficent—they’re raising money for good causes, or they’re trying to offer something different to other brands. But it’s often very surface-level: For example, many are less than transparent as to the provenance of their beans. Happy claims its coffee is roasted by “the world’s largest vertically integrated coffee roaster”, while Hanx’s FAQ page notes that it sources “from Smallholder farmers from around the world”, with few other details available.
A yet more hands-off approach to celebrity coffee is the brand partnership, in which actors and musicians license their name and image to help sell a product without being too involved in the company’s dealings. I’ve written about such collaborations before, specifically those in the music industry, but it’s a widespread phenomenon. Kyle MacLachlan has his own blend, so did David Lynch (RIP), as do a number of celebrity chefs. Leonardo DiCaprio once sold a blend in partnership with La Colombe, while Justin Bieber launched Biebs Brew with Tim Hortons in 2023.
And then there’s a secret fourth kind of celebrity coffee brand. At the far end of the spectrum, scraping the barrel of celebrity, are endeavours like Rudy Coffee—low-effort, low-quality cash-ins that barely even count as coffee companies.
How Low Can You Go
The former mayor of New York City, Giuliani was hailed for his leadership in the aftermath of 9/11. He was nicknamed “America’s Mayor” and became Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2001. (Of course, that isn’t the whole story: As Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, wrote of Giuliani, “let there be no mistake: racial bias, fear-mongering, and police brutality were the hallmarks of Giuliani’s mayoralty”.)
In 2006 Giuliani was the most popular politician in the United States, and he unsuccessfully ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 before spending the next several years as a security consultant.
He popped back up in 2016, as an advisor for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign; two years later, he joined Trump’s personal legal team. This is where things started to go downhill for the once-respected figure: Over the next four years, Giuliani was accused of various shenanigans, including involvement in the Ukraine scandal and Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. He was indicted in Georgia over the latter effort, and lost a defamation case brought by two former state election workers. The $148-million defamation verdict prompted Giuliani to file for bankruptcy, and presumably look for ways to raise some quick cash.
Enter Rudy Coffee. The disgraced and desperate Giuliani launched the brand in May 2024, six months after his bankruptcy filing and shortly after he pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. “Believe me when I say it’s the best coffee you’ll ever try”, Giuliani said in a video on social media. “It’s smooth, rich, chocolately, and gentle on your stomach”. (In an article summarising various celebrity-backed coffees, Coffee Review gave Rudy Coffee the lowest score of the lot and described it as “a burnt, vegetal, compost cup with nothing to recommend it”.)
The bags feature AI-generated images of Giuliani looking patriotic alongside buzzwords like “100% arabica” and “specialty”. They sell for $30 (£24.50) a bag—a lot, especially for something that Coffee Review also called “acrid, harsh” with a “hint of medicinal taint in aroma and cup”. And even those prices might not be high enough: As Talia Jane noted in The New Republic, Rudy Coffee would need to sell nearly five million bags in order to earn enough to pay Giuliani’s defamation fine.
The ongoing debacle that is Rudy Coffee—Giuliani’s creditors subsequently subpoenaed his company’s coffee supplier, which then itself declared bankruptcy—makes me think that perhaps it is time to pause all celebrity coffee companies until we can figure out what’s going on.
While it has been a thing for a long time—Paul Newman founded his eponymous food company in 1982, for example—celebrity retail has only recently really exploded. Almost 60% of all celebrity retail brands were founded in just the last six years, and some (although not all) have become hugely successful. Selena Gomez is a billionaire thanks to her beauty brand, and many famous would-be coffee entrepreneurs are probably eyeing the huge windfalls received by celebrities like Kylie Jenner (sold 51% of her cosmetics company for $600 million) and George Clooney (his tequila company was bought for up to $1 billion).
Aside from the obvious ego element, the realities of being a modern celebrity can necessitate seeking out multiple income streams. Online streaming has fundamentally changed the music, movie, and television industries over the past few decades, making it harder for even well-known stars to earn what they used to. Additionally, as Madison Malone Kircher wrote in the New York Times, “roles might dry up, but a successful brand can outlast someone’s good looks or the buzz they earned from their last prize nomination”.
Unlike cosmetics or alcohol (another popular sector—according to Esquire, the number of celebrity liquor brands jumped from 37 to 63 over the course of three years), coffee is an industry of relatively low margins and constant churn. A 2019 survey found that 62% of independent coffee shops fail within the first five years, while the number of coffee companies filing for bankruptcy has increased of late.
Of course, celebrity brands have an advantage. Whatever the product, having a famous face helps sales—people will pay 73% more for tequila if it’s endorsed by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or George Clooney—and judging by the reviews, many celebrities are opting for lower-quality coffee to help boost margins. (Coffee Review found Hanx Coffee to taste “low-toned, barely sweet, [and] quite burnt/bitter”.)
Some coffee-invested celebrities might be able to follow Hugh Jackman’s lead and cash in, although I would hazard that Emma Chamberlain and Jimmy Butler are probably more likely than Rudy Giuliani at this point. But especially with all the headwinds impacting the industry, I do wonder whether coffee will continue to appeal to aspiring moguls.
The Future’s Muddy
Have celebrity coffee brands jumped the shark? It’s hard to say. Coffee can still certainly be a viable business for a famous individual with an in-built customer base. But is it really a way to get rich quick, or pay off massive legal obligations? Unless you are truly passionate, or extremely famous, probably not.
The point here isn’t that celebrity coffee brands are inherently bad—some are good, while most are just a bit lame and gimmicky—but they do offer an insight into wider perceptions of coffee. Famous founders might see coffee as a relatively low-effort way to brand themselves, get some publicity, and build their business empire. And for many consumers, coffee is a cheap grocery store product with little variation, so you might as well choose the one with a recognisable name on the bag.
Last year, I predicted a rise in celebrity coffee brands, and I don’t necessarily think we’ll see the trend slow down in 2025—although Rudy Coffee indicates that the well is running dry. What I would like to see are savvier launches, less gimmickry, and more transparency. And if some begin to focus on more niche sub-sectors, maybe we’ll even see the long-awaited launch of Casper’s Cold Brew.
The past year of climate shocks and surging coffee prices has felt portentous. Without significant investment and industry cooperation, coffee’s future seems increasingly uncertain.
Coffee brands love to tout their ethics and human rights policies, yet the supply chain is still built on poverty. At some point, we have to judge the industry not by what it says but by its actions.
The coffee industry loves “community”, but it doesn’t always love the solidarity that the word signifies. Nowhere is this more obvious than in its reaction—or lack thereof—to the genocide in Gaza.
Companies in the Global North capture most of the profits generated along the coffee supply chain. But farmer-owned coffee roasters offer a more equitable model—and a path forward for the industry.
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