NUI#15 - JustPour
The Case for Fun Coffee
I’ve got a confession: I like McDonald’s coffee. Not the kind you get in India — they make that with an espresso machine and they call the plain, milkless, sugarless option an Americano. I’m not an Americano. I’m a Canadiano, and I like my Micky D’s joe poured out of a big glass pot damn it.
I haven’t lived in Canada since 2017, but back in the day there were two reasons why I consistently chose McDonald’s coffee over other brands. The first reason was that it was drip coffee, which is the kind of coffee I — and most Canadians before Keurig/Nespresso machines started invading people’s homes — grew up on.
But there’s another, more important reason why I was a fan of McDick’s: their sticker programme.
If you bought seven coffees from McDonald’s, you would get your eighth coffee free! In the summer of 2016, my friend Jed and I exploited this promotion during a cross-Canada hitchhiking adventure. We had taken a temporary vow of poverty, opting not to spend money for the duration of our journey. This meant forgoing:
Hotels/motels/hostels
Laundromats
Paid showers
Restaurants
Cafes
That summer, we spent a fair bit of time bathing in lakes and rivers (fortunately, Canada has these in abundance), sleeping behind schools and churches and under bridges, and digging through dumpsters for food. Canadians waste a lot of food. There’s a 1/10 chance that if you hit a dumpster after 10 PM outside of a pizza place, doughnut shop, or grocery store, you’ll find a glorious black garbage bag brimming with barely-expired goodies.
Every McDonald’s has at least one trash can positioned near the entrance. In wealthy towns (like the Google Maps screenshot below from Canmore, near Banff), most people don’t bother saving the sticker on their coffee cup. Jed and I would rifle through these every chance we got, fishing out dozens of McCafé cups with unpeeled stickers.
When the McDonald’s sticker promo ended in 2022, the world moved marginally deeper into a dystopia. Canadians gnashed their teeth. One migrant Canuck, then living ~12,000 km from home in Bengaluru, shed a tear for his youth. There will never be another hitchhiking summer of 2016. My days of coffee sticker skullduggery are firmly in the past.
That said, I still like to have fun with my coffee. I’m sick of average Americanos, lame lattes, and conventional cappuccinos. I don’t want to ride the third wave anymore. I don’t care about speciality coffee. And I’m sick of paying ₹250+ for an Americano.
That’s where JustPour comes in. It’s one of the most playful, goofy, unserious coffee brands I’ve ever come across. To understand what I mean, watch their launch video.
If an anthropomorphic coffee mug straddling and slapping a young man while a pink-uniformed police officer scolds him for “doing powder” wasn’t enough, JustPour takes things a step further with their packaging.
The physical product box tells the story of a liquid life form, Pour. Hailing from the planet Beano, Pour’s very existence is an insult to her fellow Beanos. They look down on her because she isn’t powder and she isn’t a bean.
Pour ends up getting banished and flies off in a UFO.
Meanwhile, down on Earth, a broken coffee cup named Jus is searching for love. A man of high standards, Jus is very particular about the coffee gal he ends up with. Specifically, the box reads, “All he wanted was good coffee. But coffee always meant effort, money, or compromise.”
Jus, a little advice: if you want to score (and keep) good coffee, you’re gonna need all three of those things in spades.
In the fictional pink world of JustPour though, there’s a fourth option: magic. Jus goes and sits beneath a nearby tree just as Pour’s UFO falls from space and crashes into the branches above his head. Pour is ejected from her vessel and falls from above, directly into… Jus’ open… head.
Don’t think too hard about it. Male and female partners in this alternate universe live in a cranium-based symbiotic relationship.
In a world of single-origin beans, speciality snobbery, and third-wave jargon that I truly cannot be bothered to learn despite having a number of founder friends in the coffee industry, JustPour is refreshingly honest about how little it cares about fitting in.
What is it?
JustPour is liquid espresso concentrate. In other words, it’s coffee that is brewed to an espresso-like intensity. This means that it works well as a base for cafe-style drinks, without requiring an espresso machine. My favourite concoction right now is my JustPour sunrise with fresh orange juice.
Other recipes include Harnidh Kaur’s JustPour protein coffee…
…and JustPour dirty matcha lattes. I’m going to christen this one Shrek’s Swamp.
(Fair) Price?
The liquid espresso market is quite new, but it’s growing quickly.
American options include Javvy Coffee at $17.47 (₹1,670) for 177 mL, and Jot Ultra Coffee at $26.60 (₹2,544) for 200 mL.
Meanwhile, in India, you can order Nescafe’s concentrated espresso on Amazon in 500 mL bottles for ₹1,899. It’s imported from Thailand though, which is why it’s on the pricier side.
Blue Tokai has begun offering Drop, which is speciality coffee concentrate in convenient 20 mL sachets. You get 10 sachets for ₹500. An Ahmedabad-based company, Korebi Coffee Roasters, has also entered the fray recently with a similar product: Doppio Instant Liquid Coffee Concentrate. They’re selling 20mL sachets in packs of 15 for ₹600.
JustPour, meanwhile, retails on Amazon for ₹650 per 200 mL.
Here’s the breakdown on a per mL basis:
While the “drops” category is a bit of a different segment (tearable sachets instead of glass bottles) it is very competitive on an mL basis. If you’re trying to get the best bang for your buck (or you want a product that you can take with you while you’re travelling) I’d go with Blue Tokai or Korebi. If you’re at home and you like the idea of pouring espresso out of a glass bottle that will last you a week if you’re doing double shots, go with JustPour.
Where did I buy it?
I order my JustPour on Amazon India. It’s on sale for ₹488 at the time of me writing this article. Noice.
You can also order it on their website.
When was it launched?
JustPour was launched on the 15th of February, 2026.
Who founded the company?
Vedang Lahoti is the mastermind behind JustPour.
He started the company with his mom, Arti Lahoti. Which is wonderful, in my opinion. His mom is a chef and baker who previously taught baking at Osmania University. She has been closely involved in recipe development and product refinement. She and Vedang worked alongside baristas and food technologists to develop and fine-tune the coffee concentrate’s flavour profile and consistency.
Vedang’s mom also assists with day-to-day operations when required, particularly when he is travelling.
State of Funding
JustPour is in the process of raising a seed round.
Why does this product exist?
Before starting the company, Vedang worked at Zepto between May of 2024 and August of 2025.
Importantly, he served as Zepto Cafe’s Senior Category Manager. In 15 months, he witnessed the platform scale from 7,000 daily orders to 130,000 daily orders.
The product category that surprised him the most was Vietnamese cold coffee. These were selling like hotcakes, but at ₹189, Vedang wondered why people weren’t making these drinks at home. After all, Zepto’s Vietnamese cold coffee consists of just five ingredients: condensed milk, milk, ice, flavoured syrup, and espresso.
After leaving Zepto, Vedang entered the idea maze of coffee. After speaking with hundreds of coffee drinkers over a two-month timespan, he realised that espresso-based drinks like Vietnamese cold coffee, espresso sunrise, or even just a standard cafe-style cappuccino, were out of reach for the average person sitting at home. Most of us do not own espresso machines, meaning that unless we visit a cafe or order cafe coffee online, we’re stuck with instant coffee powder (convenient but low quality) or brewed coffee (high quality but slow and inconvenient).
Vedang felt that liquid espresso concentrate was an obvious middle ground wherein one could enjoy the convenience of instant coffee powder and the quality of brewed coffee, while also gaining access to beverage styles that have historically only been possible with an espresso machine.
I visualise JustPour’s market positioning like this:
In the yellow circle of the Venn diagram are manual brew methods: AeroPress, Chemex, French press, moka pot, or espresso machine. You have to buy the gear, the coffee, and do all the work to prepare it, so it’s fairly expensive and inconvenient.
In the red circle is cafe coffee. There’s an infinite number of coffee shops but the ones I’ve highlighted here are Starbucks, Araku, and Subko. These are highly convenient (as a customer, you literally just show up and the barista does all the work), but you pay a premium for that convenience.
Then there’s the blue circle at the bottom. This is where instant coffee powders and espresso concentrate liquids exist. There’s a spectrum of convenience and cost here.
JustPour exists in the sweet spot between time, money, and convenience.
What does this product say about India or the Indian Consumer?
When Heisetasse Beverages Private Limited named their brand Third Wave Coffee Roasters, it kind of killed third wave coffee culture in India. The entire industry forfeited the term third wave and adopted a new category title: speciality coffee.
But I don’t think Gen Z or Gen Alpha give a shit about speciality coffee. They want boba tea. They want matcha. They want monk fruit prebiotic soda. Can you imagine a person under the age of 30 sitting in Blue Bottle with their pinky out, muttering to themselves about how, “Hm, yes, the cup opens with bergamot, white peach, and orange blossom, all underpinned by the unmistakable mineral character of the volcanic terroir.” Hell no.
Kids are already dropping alcohol. Coffee might be next. But if it manages to survive the rest of this decade, I think it will be led by brands that don’t take themselves too seriously. Brands like JustPour, whose mascot is a mug with an extraterrestrial symbiont wife for hair.
My take?
JustPour is my favourite coffee brand right now. I love seeing Vedang build his startup in public, I love the quirkiness of the brand, and I love the category they’re occupying.
But more than all of those things, I love JustPour because it’s fun. It gives me the opportunity to experiment with coffee in ways I never would have with instant powder or brewed coffee. I’m out here in Aizawl LARPing as a barista without the hassle of working in a cafe or buying an espresso machine.
Take for example this Pepsi Zero and JustPour Black combo. This just does not work with French press or Nescafe Classic powder. If Mizoram weren’t a dry state, I’d mix in some Old Monk too.
Oh, and I love the fact that JustPour comes in a brown medicine bottle! I have been obsessed with glass containers since my teens. Amidst a sea of plastic, aluminium, and paper, glass feels real.
Is JustPour as fun as filling my sticker card outside of McDonald’s in 2016? No, not quite. But it’s the most fun I’ve had with coffee since.
Can you see this becoming a regular part of your life?
Yes! JustPour is something I’ve been ordering semi-regularly on Amazon. I’m genuinely sick of instant coffee powder — I often find that it doesn’t actually give me much of a caffeine kick. JustPour, on the other hand, is incredibly strong, tastes great, and mixes well into a lot of fun recipes.
I have been rotating JustPour with Norakkan Coffee Roasters. If you enjoyed this article, do check out the NUI piece that I wrote about Norakkan next!
Any other references/links?
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"I’m not an Americano. I’m a Canadiano, and I like my Micky D’s joe poured out of a big glass pot damn it."
brb calling the Pulitzer Prize committee