We’re thrilled to present the latest addition to Afluencer’s content lineup – our podcast series featuring insightful conversations with influential brand owners. In this inaugural article, we have the privilege of introducing Ralph Amato, the visionary founder of Amato Coffees, as our esteemed guest.
Meet Ralph Amato: The Mind Behind Amato Coffees
Ralph Amato, the innovative mind driving Amato Coffees, takes center stage in the Afluencer podcast series. With a wealth of experience in the world of influencer marketing, Ralph shares captivating insights, challenges, and triumphs that have shaped his brand’s journey.
Podcast Premiere: Delving into the Amato Coffees Universe
Join us in exploring the enchanting world of Amato Coffees through the eyes of Ralph Amato himself. We’ve embedded the riveting YouTube podcast video below, offering an exclusive glimpse into the transformative power of influencer marketing.
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Transcription Insight: A Peek into the Conversation
Gain an insider’s perspective as we burrow into the transcription of our engaging conversation with Ralph Amato. Discover the strategies, anecdotes, and wisdom that have fueled Amato Coffees’ success, all captured in this in-depth transcription.
In Conversation with Ralph Amato, Founder of Amato Coffees:
Brett:
All right, and thanks for joining us today for our influencer podcast. Honored to have Shaun Kolich join us of My Spiritual Splendors. We’re going to get right into it. Shaun’s got a collab hosted with us here in the Afluencer app, and we’re going to get into that. But Shaun, first, thank you again for popping on, and I would love to start hearing a little bit about your journey. What led you to actually start and launch My Spiritual Splendors?
Ralph:
I’ve been an investment banker. I’ve worked with hundreds of different ways. So I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. How I came about with a bottle coffees was I had a client and he wanted a thousand milligrams CBD infused coffee. It’s got to be about eight buds to get the right people involved with a barista that knew how to roast coffee, a gentleman that knew how to take the product to CBD and figure out an infusion best that had no aftertaste.
You feel highly focused, your creativity goes up, your productivity definitely goes up. And we just want to give people something that will improve their health. The wellness definitely helps people on the anxiety side.
Brett:
Welcome to our affluence or podcasts, or we connect micro-influencers and creators with cool brands with unique new products. And today we’re bringing on Ralph Amato, founder of Amato Coffees. He was telling me an interesting origin story of his Coffee CBD infused products as we were hopping on the call and I wanted to set the record button so Ralph and I could kind of banter on the story here.
So Ralph, welcome. And can you give us a little bit of your background, your full career before you started and you ended up creating a lot of coffees?
Ralph:
Yes, I’ve been an investment banker for the last 30 years. I’ve worked with, you know, hundreds of different entrepreneurs, mostly Ed, moving the companies forward, taking the public. We’re raising the capital. So I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly. And how I came about with a bottle coffees was I had a client and he was a doctor and he wanted a thousand milligrams CBD infused coffee, which I said, okay, w start that.
And I have no idea what that’s going to taste like.
Brett:
Yeah. And what year was that? I’m just curious when when that was because I know CBD has been.
Ralph:
This is this was three years ago we started.
Brett:
This. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. So it took.
Ralph:
Me about eight months to get the right people involved with a barista that knew how to roast coffee, a gentleman that knew how to take the the product, the CBD, and figure out an infusion based. And so that was our big goal was no aftertaste that you taste this, that you can’t tell there’s any CBD, but you get the effects of CBD.
So after body buds, we figured it out, We got the infusion process going and then it was important to us to have scalability. So we had to get this approved by the state where we get it manufactured and we wanted to use a a well at sizable baby factory so that we could scale it so that what we wanted to go into supermarkets or big box stores or health food stores, we would have a manufacturer that met that criteria because you’re not getting it to those places unless you got barcodes, QR codes to AD and the production facility meet certain US standards.
Okay, So that was important to us so that we could scale this up with the time was right because there’s companies like Whole Foods that are starting to do cold brew coffee and such. So it’s starting to become mainstream. And the product that we put together, what you take it within about 50 minutes, you feel highly focused, your creativity goes up, your productivity definitely goes up and at for certain other people, because everybody’s metabolism is a little different.
We’ve noticed that people that have a lot of anxiety or or even on beds for depression paid. This works in conjunction with that. It definitely helps people on the anxiety side.
Brett:
Does the coffee aspect of it help keep you awake and know from personal experience when they take the CBD tinctures to go to sleep? Probably around when you were a certain amount of coffees, it knocks you out, right? And I made the mistake once I’ve taken it, taken a tincture during the day, and I thought I was going to crawl up on my couch.
Ralph:
There’s different formulas. Ours is a broad spectrum, and the combination with the caffeine in the coffee kicks it into high gear. You know, there’s a lot of people ask me this because a lot of people take goggles, especially at night to go to sleep. But this hasn’t exactly very different effect. Right? It it definitely gets you up. It gets you going and it keeps you focused that if you take a cup or two is good for 4 to 6 hours.
Brett:
God, I. So this keeps you going. So this is something you could take morning and maybe.
Ralph:
It’s best to have it as your first and even second cup at the boarding because it’ll definitely get you going.
Brett:
Yeah. Got you. Something. Is anything unique then, about the blend, the fact I know there’s all these health benefits research keeps coming out about the benefits of coffee. Right. Have you found that in your experience or anecdotes in terms of having that coffee aspect being almost like a, I don’t know, say, multiplier, but a positive sort of positive, you know, synergies there with the CBD?
Ralph:
Yeah, I think that people today, they they need something, you know, to kind of start your day and not just caffeine because caffeine has a tendency to bring you up but that you crash. Okay. So this is more ongoing. And then if you want to, you know, obviously keep it going for the day, you just, you know, 4 hours later or or more, you just take a second cup.
It’ll keep it rolling through the day. But it it definitely helps with, you know, you’re thinking what you’re doing and it keeps you on your game. It’s simple English, but we started out with a dark roast supremo, Colombian coffee. We’re going to be a vegetable if we get to a breakfast blend. What are the other areas that we’re looking at?
Is CBD infused honey? And believe it or not, what are the biggest areas is now it’s the coffee. So we wanted to do it. It’s the coffee and you would think that wouldn’t be that big. But that’s a $60 billion a year area just for it’s the coffee. I was totally surprised. I haven’t heard of. It’s the coffee since like I was a kid.
Like, good to have it kind of center at the house.
Brett:
Right? Right. Yeah. Has it has it graduated since back in the day like would would a little Keurig Cup now qualify as instant or is that.
Ralph:
Well we have the K-Cups. I’m glad you brought that up. You know we we also have K-Cups. So right now we have a ground coffee. Of course we have a whole bead. We have the K-Cups. So it basically breaks down to about what you purchased the product. The product comes to about $2.50. All right. If you if you subscribe, then literally for the digital less than $20, you’re getting a second bag.
It will pay will pay. The delivery costs are that.
Brett:
Nice for a good way to.
Ralph:
So I mean, you could get literally two bags for under $100 at that it we pay for the shipping and our competition it has products out there that are 500 milligrams and they’re more than $50 a bag. So I think we’re highly competitive. We definitely have a higher coffee that we’re giving people. And, you know, again, the most important part, go after taste at all.
Brett:
Yeah. Whereas we were talking before any CBD drink I know I’ve had before, it’s ranged from bad to Yeah.
Ralph:
It’s not the greatest athlete below it. Right. So I tried to get up to get there with that. But CBD where, where you’re not, you get like what’s that taste. Right. You, you want something that’s like, oh it’s like tastes like the regular coffee I drink, you know, high end coffee. So.
Brett:
Right. Yeah. I had a friend who had a CBD beverage company and it was kind of like a sparkling drink that they had CBD infused into and it was the best I had tasted, which put it at about a four out of ten. And anyway, the company didn’t work in a shop shutting it down because there were very few repeat orders because they had it, you know, like this is okay, but it’s not something that you want to keep and you’d.
Ralph:
Have to put a lot of really good flavorings in there to to be able to pull that off. And that would be a trial and error thing just like ours was trial and error.
Brett:
Yeah, it was eight months, you said, of trial and error in terms of finding that flavor profile.
Ralph:
In how to do it. I mean, what’s what’s the right time and well, when do you do the infusion process. And we we had to rethink the whole way that K-Cups are day to day because usually K-Cups are are are based on it’s basically a coffee with a flavor. They get it for buzz part. Right. And you can’t do that with this.
You’re not going to impregnate, you know, thousands of cups. It won’t work every single blow up. So we figured out an alternative method to be able to do production, and it worked great. So, you know, we get the same about as CBD. It’s 40 milligrams per cup, which is twice as much as like our competitor. And we just want to give people something that they could take out of that everyday basis that would improve their health, their wellness, and it take care of some of the aches and pains that they’ve got.
You know, if they’ve got an excited issue or they’ve got suffering from depression, you know, as you probably know, a lot of people there’s I think the numbers 8.6 billion people or a meds right for depression. It added for example 84 paid and and most people would they’ve been taking these types of medications for a while. You know the stuff starts to wear off and now they’re doubling up so halfway through the month they’re running out of medication and that they’re by, you know, something that’s not prescribed to get them through the ED.
But so if you take this in conjunction with that. All right. So they’re going to replace their medications, but it’ll help them a lot so they don’t have to take as much medication as they normally would take.
Brett:
Yeah, we had a team member who was anxious and she had success with CBD as opposed to traditional meds. She liked it. It kind of calm her down and so, you know, she kind of enjoyed the CBD brands that we had here that we were talking about from a branding standpoint. They’re Ralphs. You’ve been through this kind of from the investment banking standpoint, right?
I’m sure with your clients there and you’re saying, Hey, what’s your competitive advantage? What’s your differentiator? And you know that you can have a better product, but then you also have to market it and brand it. And that’s kind of the other part of it, right? How is that journey been for you? And now that you’re in the trenches, entrepreneur yourself and you’ve got a thousand milligrams, there’s 500 and you’ve got a better taste, but now you get to get the word out.
So how is that you’re.
Ralph:
Going to get the word out? You know, it’s it’s definitely I’ve spoken over the last couple of years to probably 100 different companies and know most of them are agencies that, you know, they have a they have their own kind of protocols of what they’re trying to sell you and such. But I think the best way it was described to me is, is marketing is like baking a cake, right?
You’ve got all these different ingredients. And if you put the ingredients together correctly, your cake rises. And if you don’t, does it? I think the best route for us, though, that Big said is is influencers because they think we we will supply them with it with a bag of our coffee and our coffee. You know what bag retails for 7995 and then you get to the bags for 99, 99, 90 above it again, you know, we pay for the shipping, but we let them just brew the coffee.
Whoever the influencer is, they could go in there and try the coffee and then they could feel what the reaction is. All right. So they’ll they’ll see it then. It’ll be an honest reaction. All right. I’ve tried this. It helped me with my anxiety or. Or Oh, my God. Just take baby, like, highly focused. So everybody’s going to have a different reaction, which is part of of of this, which is everybody’s metabolism is different.
So everybody’s experience will be different. And that’s what we’re looking for is they have the influencers give us an honest assessment of what they did, how they made it, and what were the results.
Brett:
Yeah, that’s kind of the best commercial that there is, right, is to have someone going through it. And as you and I were talking before, if we can find influencers who are watching and the health and wellness and fitness and nutrition types industries right where, hey, this is what I’m doing as part of my day, I’m starting with a model coffees, Here’s my experience and here’s where you can go ahead and you can buy the ground bag or the K-Cups or whatever process you use to start your day with your coffee.
Ralph:
Yeah, we found that, you know, if you look at the statistics, about 28% of Americans use K-Cups. Right. And about 20% do a whole bead like what we do when we sell to, let’s say, cafes and such restaurants. Those they like the whole bit because they like to grind it themselves and do it themselves. But, you know, the majority of its crowd.
So you’ve got about 20% of it is folded, about 30% of its K-Cups and the other 50% is grout.
Brett:
Yeah, So interesting. Educate me there on the trends there, Ralph. I’m a whole being guy. I’ve got my fancy grinder and now these days we go with the pour over onto the beans and I have a friend is kind of a high end food guy and he thinks I’m crazy. I used to just go with the coffee maker and then we just have to go with the grounds of other friends who swear by the current machine.
Right. Just the convenience of it. Where are the trends moving and who’s driving those trends? I guess with the restaurants. So you’re going the whole beans, are those percentages static or are they moving in a certain direction here in the coffee industry?
Ralph:
It’s interesting because most of let’s say, let’s take cafes, right? So cafes, you know, they’re used to selling a lot or a cappuccino or they could get about six bucks for that. With with a CBD product like this, they could charge, you know, they could get upwards of $10 a cup. And we’ve seen restaurants charge as much as 50 bucks a cup for this stuff.
So it up at the Las Vegas at Las Vegas is starting to open up lounges now where you could eat, drink and smoke pot. It’s the same place right?
Brett:
Everything you need.
Ralph:
So something like this that’ll keep you up at the end of the night would be a really smart idea.
Brett:
Welcome. Yeah.
Ralph:
When you start to drive. Oh, right. So these are types of things that are kind of working in our favor. Some of the new laws, especially in Las Vegas, because there a lot of, you know, cannabis shops here and they’re huge. I read, you know, you’ve got places like plated 38 or 122,000 square feet. So everyone that I visited there were all at least 5000 square feet, if not bigger.
And they’re all sizable and they have a range of products from, you know, cannabis down to CBD. So, you know, you have your kind of pick of the litter of what you’d like. And I kind of see these different trends and you could definitely see the consolidation in that industry. You know, the big guys are now swallowed up, the little guys, you know, it used to be you go to a shop and you’re dealing with the odor now, you know, it’s all corporate.
You got to get in touch with them, but you’ve got to sit down with the buyer and let them trade a product that go from there. So it’s definitely a process.
Brett:
Interesting. Yeah, we’ve seen them here in Northern California. We’ve seen the flip with the official legality of a shall we say. We’ve had a dispensary a couple of blocks from our house that was very popular for many of our ever since we bought the house. It used to take a doctor’s note. And then when the laws change, now anyone can go in and you show your I.D. and but the difference that you see is there.
So business is booming as much as ever there, but you see the different dispensaries popping up. And like you said, I mean, that’s that’s a corporate game now, right? Because that’s capital city. I mean, that’s your old that’s your old world capital building.
Ralph:
Definitely got corporate. Yeah. There’s a lot of consolidation, you know, because it’s you’ve got to have buying power to have staying power in it and it’s not an industry that it expects to enter.
Brett:
Interesting point you made on the price points because you can almost prices it’s almost like a an alcoholic beverage, right. A cocktail. It just demands a price premium. If you have it out and you have a CBD infused coffee, it’s something that you should pay ten or $15. You know.
Ralph:
Our goal is to give them the best CBD. So ours is this is a a broad spectrum. Distill it. All right. So the difference is that there’s a thing called isolate. Isolate is like a white powder. Okay? And that has one molecule, CBD molecule, but a broad spectrum distillate has 130 cannabinoids. So your body has a CBD, one in your brain, it a cb2 receptor.
And what this does is 130 cannabinoids go throughout your entire system. So taking this on a daily basis is it is as good a wellness as you could hope for, for having something that’s good for you and has a lot of preventative properties in it so that you don’t have the aches and pains that you normally get. You know, again, you’re on your game, you’re feeling good about things, you’re focused, your productivity goes longer for for the day.
And I take it every day I’ve been drinking the stuff for a couple of years now. So it works that I could guarantee you. Yeah.
Brett:
Yeah, I believe it. My first experience with CBD was actually with my last our elderly dog. Right? And we tried a lot of things and then we tried CBD and that kind of popped her up at the end of her life and gave her that good quality of life. And ironically, I don’t think it was quote, quote unquote legal yet here in California.
Our vet, she wasn’t allowed to tell me that it was okay, but she kind of nodded and said, Yeah, that’s a good.
Ralph:
Way to.
Brett:
Smile. Yeah, yeah. Anecdotally we see it. I’m not allowed to tell you, but it works out. So thanks so much, Rob. This has been awesome. Hearing about your journey with the model coffees and the benefits here. How can people find your coffee, buy your coffee, and also apply to partner with you as an influencer?
Ralph:
Yeah, it’s a bottle coffee, scone and I’m on a fluid service so they could hit me up there and we’re just looking for the right people that will try the product and give us their honest assessment of of how they feel about it and what it did for them. And I think that’ll speak volumes too to people that follow the.
Brett:
Great tomorrow coffees dot com and we’ll get the link to your collab right below this video here in the show notes our influencer creator friends can apply and we’ll get you connected up with Ralph. Ralph, thanks so much for joining us today.
Ralph:
Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
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Ralph:
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