🤯 How Prefer made beanless coffee that's 2x cheaper and 90% greener

Hey Founders,

👋🏻 Welcome to The Runway Ventures (🎙️Podcast Edition) — where I interview founders and deep dive into their stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their startup journey and mistakes with actionable insights.

Today’s story is about how Prefer got 100% inbound sales with guerrilla marketing and hit $15M in B2B deals pipeline. Let’s get to it! 🚀

🫡 1 Founder: Jake Berber (co-founder & CEO of Prefer)

🌟 The Highlights

🇸🇬 Jake Berber, a neuroscience grad turned biotech ops guy, co-founded Prefer with DJ (Ding Jie) in Nov 2022 after meeting each other at Entrepreneur First’s Singapore cohort. Their vision? To future-proof coffee from the impacts of climate change by making bean-free coffee that is delicious, affordable, and sustainable.

• The Problem — ☕️ Coffee farming is in crisis as climate change has endangered ~60% of coffee species and driven prices to near 50-year highs.

  • That spike is squeezing everyone from farmers to instant‑coffee brands, forcing companies to look for ways to cut ingredient costs while also grappling with coffee’s hefty carbon footprint.

  • Big coffee brands have no choice but to increase coffee prices, making it more and more inaccessible to people.

• The Solution — 🤯 Prefer replaces actual coffee beans with a bean‑free, fermentation‑based coffee ingredient. Here’s how it works:

  • Upcycle waste — Take food‑industry by‑products (like surplus bread, okara from soy, and spent grain) as the raw material.

  • Ferment — Use proprietary, food‑safe microbes to convert those substrates into coffee‑like flavour compounds.

  • Roast & grind — Treat the fermented cakes exactly like coffee beans — roast them, grind them, and package them as a drop‑in coffee powder.

🚀 Their wins? Wild traction from day one:

• Prototype in weeks — DJ whipped up a V1 in his kitchen.

• B2B love — Instead of baristas, they targeted FMCGs hurting from bean costs.

  • Instant inbound demand from Korea, Thailand, and Australia.

  • They even landed in Google’s fridges.

• Viral LinkedIn hustle — Jake’s posts with his signature photoshopped giant prefer bottles hit 1M+ monthly impressions.

  • Zero ad spend. Sales poured in.

• IP licensing game-changer — Big players wanted to license their tech.

  • Prefer could scale without massive factories — just teach others to brew it, and take royalties.

At its peak, the team was riding high on momentum — raising funds, landing partners, and getting rave reviews — and it looked like Prefer is going to shake up the coffee industry.

🌋 The Lowlights

But behind the hype? Sheer panic.

🙏🏻 During their fundraise, Prefer had one month of cash left. They couldn’t even make the next payroll until the wire arrived.

Then, Jake also shared that they made the mistake of hiring based on skills instead of culture fit in those early hiring rounds.

🦄 They hired technically strong candidates who weren’t fully aligned with the startup’s “all‑hands‑on‑deck” mindset.

As onboarding costs piled up, a few of these hires turned out to be a poor match for the team’s fast‑paced, resource‑constrained environment, leading to awkward partings and a hit to both morale and runway.

 🚀 The Comeback

💪🏻 Fortunately, luck and persistence (and good investor faith) prevailed. Within days the $2M finally hit their account, and just like that they were “back to building”.

With a fresh runway, the team regrouped and resolved to apply those lessons. They tightened the hiring process to ensure every new teammate truly “doubles down” on the mission with culture fit.

They also pivoted smartly.

💫 One big strategic shift was a 2-pronged business model:

1. Supplier of bean-free coffee ingredients

2. Licensor of their recipe / IP

   • In practice Prefer licenses its fermentation know-how to big food companies, taking a royalty while those partners scale up production themselves.

💰 This CAPEX-light licensing model has attracted a lot of interest because large FMCGs could scale up as quickly as they want without relying on their scale, making it a “win-win”. (and the license-driven approach is effectively their route to a billion-dollar business).

By mid-2025 Prefer was everywhere.

🚀 Prefer coffee is stocked in about 75 outlets across Singapore — and they’re on track to hit 100 by year’s end. They’ve signed roughly $15M in non-binding offtake agreements with major B2B partners (FMCGs, ingredient manufacturers, and coffee chains), and they’re ramping up production (building up to 500 tonnes/year via toll-manufacturing) to meet demand.

📌 Here’s the TLDR of Prefer:

☕️ Prefer’s fighting climate change by reinventing coffee — no beans needed.

From kitchen experiments to near-death experiences, they’ve hustled and listened their way into partnerships with global giants.

Their secret? Listen to customers and let customers’ demands pull you forward. Coffee’s future might just be bean-free, fermented, and freakishly resilient.

Want to learn more about Prefer?

• Prefer (Website)

• Watch the full podcast with Jake (co-founder & CEO of Prefer)

• Singaporean Bean-Free Coffee Startup Nabs Major Ice Cream Collab

⚠️ 2 Mistakes

Mistake 1: Hired based on skills (not culture fit)

Early on, Prefer hired technically strong candidates who weren’t fully aligned with the startup’s “all‑hands‑on‑deck” mindset.

A couple of technically great folks simply didn’t gel, which meant costly onboarding, awkward off-boarding, and morale dips when teammates left.

🫡 Now, Jake asks this question before hiring anyone, “Would I work 12 hrs/day with this person for 10 years? If not — no hire.”

Mistake 2: The “Built it & They’ll Come” hardware delusion

Jake and DJ built their first bean-free coffee prototype in a kitchen, convinced sustainability alone would make FMCGs line up.

But the reality?

Big coffee chains didn’t care about "saving the planet" — they cared about soaring bean costs (coffee prices hit all-time highs in 2024).

Their initial B2B pitches flopped because they led with "eco-friendly," not "we’ll cut your ingredient costs by 30%."

🧠 3 Lessons Learned

Lesson 1: Hire for mission (not just metrics)

In a scrappy startup, your first 10 hires define your culture.

Skills can always be learned.

Culture fit? It starts from Day 1.

Lesson 2: Always listen to your customers

Early on at Prefer, every product tweak and business decision came straight from customer feedback.

💰 When large FMCGs started asking not just for powdered coffee but for the recipe itself, Jake and DJ didn’t cling to their original model — they leaned in. That direct request sparked their CAPEX‑light IP licensing offering, unlocking a whole new revenue stream.

Build what your customers want. Solve their problems. And you’ll win.

Lesson 3: Creative marketing to win the B2B game

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See you again next week.

- Admond

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