Startup: Coffee Candy offers caffeinated convenience on the go

As someone who has traveled up and down the East Coast, Don Li, founder of Coffee on the Go, understands the struggle between staying caffeinated on long car rides and making countless stops to use the bathroom.

This hassle led Li to ask himself: What if people could eat coffee instead of drinking it?

Li decided to create Coffee Candy, rich dark chocolate and coffee-tasting square treats, in 2021. He later founded Coffee on the Go in August 2022.

“I believe (Coffee Candy) brings convenience to customers, especially coffee lovers,” Li said.

Coffee Candy is made from a short list of ingredients — the main one being instant coffee. Each piece of candy contains 32 milligrams of caffeine, making three pieces equivalent to drinking one cup of coffee.

“I wanted it to taste really good and it needed to have sufficient caffeine in it to justify it’s really coffee,” Li said.

Before creating the candy, Li — a former software engineer — spent months researching how to make a product that tasted good, was nutritional and, most importantly, safe.

The first trial product Li created was a caffeine-infused brownie. While the brownie was well received by people taste-testing it, Li explained that a key downside was the shelf life of the product.

“If you want to sell them in a store like Walmart or Target, you cannot do that,” Li said. “Then I pivoted to coffee candy.”

Using the AI software ChatGPT, Li conducted marketing research to find which professions would benefit the most from Coffee Candy. The results included truck drivers and airplane pilots — anyone who needs to stay alert and awake for long periods of time.

Li now works as a one-man operation to make the candy, which allows him to cut down on costs and keep the candy formula confidential. He has hired consultants to help with specific tasks including building the Coffee Candy website and designing the logo and product packaging.

Each batch of candy is made in commercial kitchens owned by Old Mill Kitchen and Commissary. Li said that it takes him 2 ½ hours to make one batch of Coffee Candy.

“At some point, we would need our own production facility,” Li said. “The future plan is to raise money — serious money — and venture capital. You know, a few million dollars.”

Coffee Candy can be purchased online on the Coffee on the Go website. So far, the customers purchasing Coffee Candy have been both mid-size companies and individual buyers.

“It is not consistent,” Li said. “Sometimes we sell more, sometimes we sell less. People don’t really know what (Coffee Candy) is and so having the product to be known to a wider audience — that kind of awareness will definitely help.”

Li said the company recently received a permit for wholesale distribution from the South Carolina Department of Agriculture which allows Coffee Candy to be sold to retail outlets including gas stations, retail stores and grocery stores.