The Bottles Nobody Picks Up
There's a cold brew sitting on the bottom shelf at Whole Foods. It's been there for at least two years. I've never seen anyone reach for it. The bottles collect dust behind the Stumptown and Chameleon displays.
Wandering Bear started in 2014. Two guys from Columbia Business School launched it out of a dorm room. They sold cold brew in bags with spigots, like boxed wine. The company got acquired by Danone in 2020 for somewhere around $25 million. Industry people expected them to disappear into the Danone portfolio and die quietly.
They didn't.
The Extra Strong line launched in late 2022. I found my first bottle in March 2023 at a random Whole Foods in Austin. $4.99 for 11 ounces. I bought it because the shelf tag said 200mg caffeine. I was driving to San Antonio that afternoon and needed something stronger than the usual 120mg bottles.
That first sip in the parking lot changed how I think about bottled cold brew.
The Concentration Problem
Most ready-to-drink cold brews are watered down. This is not controversial. Anyone who makes cold brew at home knows the standard ratio is somewhere between 1:4 and 1:8 concentrate to water. Commercial brands push this further.
Stok, the grocery store staple, comes in at 10mg per ounce.
The difference sounds small on paper. In the mouth, it's not small. The body is thicker. The coffee flavor is actually coffee flavor, not coffee-adjacent water. The finish lingers for twenty or thirty seconds instead of disappearing immediately.
I kept a spreadsheet for about six months in 2023. Tasted every bottled cold brew I could find, recorded caffeine content, price per ounce, and a simple rating from 1 to 5. Wandering Bear Extra Strong scored a 4. Nothing else broke 3.5.
What Everyone Buys Instead
Stumptown dominates the premium cold brew shelf. They've been at it since 2011. The stubby brown bottles are recognizable from twenty feet away. Whole Foods gives them eye-level placement. The brand has cultural weight.
The product inside those bottles is fine. Not great. Fine.
I drank Stumptown cold brew regularly from 2016 to 2022. At some point the flavor profile shifted. The early bottles had a chocolate note and a slight citrus edge. The current version tastes flat. Rounder, less interesting. I asked a former Stumptown employee about this at a trade show last year. He said the roast profile changed in 2019 to accommodate larger batch sizes. I can't verify this.
Chameleon is the other shelf dominator. They've been around since 2010, started in Austin. Sold to Nestlé in 2017. The concentrate bottles are genuinely useful for home mixing. The ready-to-drink stuff is thin.
La Colombe has the Draft Latte line, which is a different product category. Their straight cold brew doesn't get much attention. It's serviceable.
The Wandering Bear Story
Matt Bachmann and Ben Gordon launched Wandering Bear with $25,000 in late 2014. The original product was cold brew in a bag-in-box format, three liters for about $24. They targeted offices. The pitch was simple: keep this in the break room fridge, employees serve themselves, cheaper than a coffee service.
The office model worked well enough to attract funding. Series A in 2016, Series B in 2018. By 2019 they were in 10,000 retail locations. The boxed format expanded to smaller cartons for home use. The Danone acquisition happened in April 2020, right when office coffee consumption collapsed.
I assumed the brand would get shelved. Danone has a history of acquiring small beverage companies and letting them wither. The organic juice brand Wallaby went this route. So did Happy Family organics.
Wandering Bear kept releasing new products. The Extra Strong line came out in 2022. A mocha version followed in early 2023. An oat milk variety landed last summer. Someone inside Danone is apparently protecting this brand.
The retail placement tells a different story. Wandering Bear bottles sit below Stumptown and Chameleon at every Whole Foods I've visited. Eye level goes to the established names. Bottom shelf goes to the brand owned by a French multinational.
Typical Whole Foods cold brew shelf. Wandering Bear on the bottom left, behind the price tag.
Tasting Notes
I've gone through probably sixty bottles of the Extra Strong since March 2023. The flavor is consistent batch to batch, which matters more than people think. Chameleon has variation. Stumptown has variation. Wandering Bear tastes the same every time.
The roast is medium-dark. Not burnt, not light and fruity. The dominant note is baker's chocolate. There's a slight nuttiness underneath. No added flavors, no sweeteners, no milk. Just coffee and water.
The texture is where this thing separates from the competition. Cold brew should coat your tongue slightly. Most bottled versions feel like water with coffee flavoring. Wandering Bear feels like actual cold brew, the kind you'd make at home with a decent ratio.
I served it to three people last Thanksgiving without telling them the brand. All three guessed it was homemade. One person asked for my recipe.
Pricing
| Brand | Price | Size | Per Ounce |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wandering Bear Extra Strong | $4.99 | 11 oz | 45¢ |
| Stumptown | $4.49 | 10.5 oz | 43¢ |
| Chameleon | $3.99 | 10 oz | 40¢ |
Price per milligram of caffeine, Wandering Bear wins. Price per ounce, Chameleon wins. Taste per dollar, Wandering Bear wins by a wide margin.
The six-packs on Amazon drop the per-bottle price to $4.16. I buy these every two months. The shelf life is about six months, so stocking up makes sense.
The Problems
The bottles are plastic. I prefer glass. The environmental argument is complicated—plastic is lighter, cheaper to ship, lower carbon footprint per unit. I still prefer glass. It feels better. The coffee stays colder longer.
The bottle shape is awkward. It's a squat cylinder that doesn't fit well in car cup holders. Stumptown's bottles fit. La Colombe's cans fit. Wandering Bear made a design choice that prioritizes shelf stability over daily use ergonomics.
Availability is inconsistent. My local Whole Foods in Dallas stocks it reliably. The Whole Foods in Fort Worth does not carry it at all. Target has it occasionally. Kroger does not. Amazon is the only guaranteed source.
The name is forgettable. Wandering Bear sounds like a camping supply company. Stumptown sounds like a coffee company. Chameleon at least has visual distinctiveness. Wandering Bear has a cartoon bear logo that reads as generic from a distance.
My Current Rotation
I keep six bottles of Extra Strong in my garage fridge at any given time. This covers about three weeks of consumption at two bottles per week.
On weekday mornings I drink it straight, cold, no additions. On weekends I sometimes add an ounce of oat milk. The chocolate notes pop more with a small amount of fat.
I've tried heating it for hot coffee in a pinch. It works. The flavor holds up better than most cold brews heated. Still not as good as fresh hot coffee.
For travel, I bring a bottle in a small cooler bag. Airport coffee is uniformly bad. Hotel coffee is worse. A bottle of decent cold brew solves the problem for about five bucks.
Looking Forward
Wandering Bear released a limited Ethiopian single-origin cold brew last month. I found three bottles at Central Market two weeks ago. Lighter roast, more fruit notes, $6.99 per bottle. Interesting but not essential. The Extra Strong remains the product to buy.
The ready-to-drink cold brew market grew about 15% last year. Most of that growth went to Starbucks bottled products, which are manufactured by PepsiCo and taste like sweetened coffee-flavored water. The premium segment is flat. Consumers aren't discovering smaller brands.
I don't know if Wandering Bear will ever get proper shelf placement. The Danone ownership complicates retail relationships. Whole Foods has incentives to feature brands without multinational backing. The product quality doesn't seem to matter.
For now, the bottles stay on the bottom shelf. They'll be there next week, next month, probably next year. Sixty bottles in, I'm still reaching down past the Stumptown to grab them.