Karen Danudjaja is the CEO of Blume, a DTC functional beverage company sold in over 4000 stores across Canada and the US. Customers can find Blume products online via Amazon and on shelves in retail outlets like Loblaws, Target and Whole Foods, where its superfood latte powders hit the right blend of nutrition and taste. With colourfully packaged drink mixes in luxury flavours like Turmeric Latte, Beetroot, and Rose London Fog, Blume makes it easy for customers to support at-home wellness habits through powdered superfood blends. The powders can be added to smoothies, oatmeal, or lattes for a healthy at home ritual.
Around the start of 2020, two years after launching Blume, Danudjaja bought out her co-founder and put her savings into the company – just as the rest of the world, including the cafes stocking Blume’s products, shut down. Danudjaja decided to pivot, selling her Blume products direct-to-consumer (DTC). She launched new flavors like Matcha Coconut Blend and Blue Lavender Blend, incorporating good for you ingredients into the foods that customers already loved. It was a match made in heaven during the pandemic, as customers were able to prepare coffee shop-ready lattes and smoothies at home.
The company’s DTC revenue grew 300% the following year, as Blume discovered its product-market fit and expanded into national retail. Today, Danudjaja says she’s ‘obsessed’ with the gap in the market that exists between sipping lattes in a cafe (warm, social) and buying products from a store (transactional). She says Blume, which allows customers to bring familiar flavours and healthy ingredients home, is a way to bridge that gap – allowing customers to have a familiar coffee shop taste in an at-home format.
“Winning an award like the ScaleUp award, I think, signals that we’re in the next phase of Blume,” says Danudjaja. “It’s more about refining the foundations we’ve built over the last 8 years.”
Today, Danudjaja says online retailers like Amazon make up about 30% of their business, where events like Prime Day generate waves of new customers looking to try something new. With fresh flavors like Peach Lychee, Acai Pomegranate, and Strawberry Hibiscus joining the roster of Blume’s popular SuperBelly hydration powders and cozy flavours like Salted Caramel hitting the roster of Superfood Lattes, Blume continues to expand to meet the needs of its over 350,000 customers and 20,000 daily subscribers across North America. With so much loyalty to this fresh new brand, Blume has earned its spot atop the list of ScaleUP entrepreneurs!
