Free Bean Coffee Company, a local startup founded by four students at the University of Michigan, is aiming to take an innovative approach to coffee distribution. The company offers free, ready-to-drink coffee cans labeled with advertisements in temporary locations across campus such as the Diag. By selling space on the cans, Free Bean provides companies with a distinctive way to reach customers while offering free coffee to those passing by. The company launched in Dec. 2024, initially targeting the local Ann Arbor community before seeking broader expansion.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Adam Korsunsky, LSA senior and CEO of Free Bean, said the founding goal of Free Bean was to confront the two main issues they observed in the current coffee market in Ann Arbor: the rising prices of coffee and lack of opportunities for local businesses to advertise to college students.
“We wanted to find a cheaper alternative for consumers, especially with everything going on right now and people’s low willingness to pay,” Adam Korsunsky said. “We thought, ‘How can we solve that?’ And that led us to potentially putting advertisements on the can, at which point we realized there was another problem — there was little to no advertising on university campuses (for local businesses).”
Brett Korsunsky, Business senior and chief operating officer of Free Bean, told The Daily there were challenges to implementing their model with no example to go off of.
“Generally speaking, when someone comes up with an idea, they think, ‘Okay, let me lean on resources that have done something adjacent,’ and they can look at that and see the results,” Brett Korsunsky said. “So for us, the main challenge was basically, how do we do this? Through different research and connecting with people — talking to people who had either worked in the advertising space or worked in the coffee production space — we tried to combine all the accumulated knowledge from either side to build out our business model.”
Jett Zimmerman, LSA senior and chief product officer of Free Bean, told The Daily the University played an important role in supporting the team’s growth and tackling challenges.
“Doing the entrepreneurship minor, I felt like there were times throughout different courses that I had to take, whether it’s building out pitch decks or finding out how to locate your target customer, that really helped me throughout the process of building out a company,” Zimmerman said.
Local business Cinnaholic also saw promise in Free Bean’s model, partnering with the company during its launch. As the first local partner, Cinnaholic owner Doug Moeller saw an advertising opportunity in the company’s distribution strategy. He reflected on his decision to work with the startup in an email to The Daily.
“It struck me as a way to get in front of students on a product that I knew they were going to be looking at for a bit,” Moeller wrote. “It’s so hard to find a way to get the attention of students. Social media advertising is just not as effective as it used to be, so there’s not a lot of other options. The team was professional, responsive, and made the whole experience seamless.”
Focused on the future, Brett Korsunsky said Free Bean’s founders have already set their sights on expanding beyond college campuses to office settings.
“What we initially thought would be this sort of duplicated approach at different campuses across the country wouldn’t help us scale as fast,” Brett Korsunsky said. “So instead, with the advice of some people we spoke to, we decided to pursue office buildings and specifically co-working spaces. We’re now in discussion with several co-working spaces in the Metro Detroit area, and we intend to start supplying coffee on a regular basis in the next two to three weeks.”
Daily Staff Reporter Nick Denenberg can be reached at nicoden@umich.edu.
