Two Bears Coffee: Starting from Scratch

David and Moustafa have been friends since they were 12 years old. They connected because they had similar life goals and hobbies, from playing basketball when they were teenagers to their opinions about starting a business. Being so alike, not only made them lifelong friends, but successful business partners who started Two Bears Coffee only two years ago.

The pair both believes that a business should be thought of backwards. Instead of deciding what you want to do, decide why you want to do it. “The why for us was to travel, have fun, make a positive difference in people’s lives and sell a product we love,” David shared. He remembers being an entrepreneur for as long as he could remember as he’s always enjoyed building something from scratch to a real product.

Their business, Two Bears Coffee, specializes in cold brew coffee, which most people didn’t even know about when they launched. To make their product they take premium specialty grade direct trade beans that are then cold brewed over 16 hours to produce a naturally sweet tasting coffee that can be enjoyed in several different ways, including over ice.

However, being a product that no one was really doing was a huge barrier for David and Moustafa. There wasn’t a recipe book out there, and when they had questions, not even Google could help them out. “We really had to MacGyver on coming up with solutions. We did everything we could to grow, from cold emailing food scientists off LinkedIn to speaking with plumbers to develop a way to make bigger batches,” David explained.

This challenge however didn’t stop the business partners from pushing through and pursuing their dreams. Staying the course can be one of the biggest challenges for new entrepreneurs, and David definitely agreed that it was easy to come up with new ideas that seemed better but realized that if you make too many changes you end up spinning your wheels. So David and Moustafa stuck with their idea, and worked their butts off to make people understand and want their new product. “We brewed and hand bottled through the night and drove around selling brew to stores one-by-one during the day until we grew into distribution.”

Their hard work paid off as Two Bears Coffee is now available in over 350 retailers across Canada, including well-known giants like Whole Foods, and when we caught up with them recently they were hoping to expand beyond the Canadian borders in the near future.

The Futurpreneur team can’t wait to follow David and Moustafa on their cold brew journey. The pair wanted to leave other entrepreneurs with this one piece of advice: “Just show up. A great part about being an entrepreneur is the planning and brainstorming, but I think some people have internal fear when it comes to executing. If you have a good product and love what you do, then go for it. Plan and execute.”