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Vivi Labs 🤝 Whole Foods: Whole Foods just dropped their 2026 Food + Beverage Trends. Two of their biggest calls for the year ahead: 🥇 Instant Reimagined: High-quality, functional instant drinks are having a moment. 🥈 Sweet, But Smarter: Real sugar is back When we started building Vivi over a year ago, almost everyone told us not to make it instant. That “instant” meant cheap or low-quality. Friends, investors, even a few early believers bailed on the idea. Respectfully, that’s when I knew we were onto something. We’ve spent the last year traveling (not in a fancy way), testing, sourcing, and proving we could make instant coffee that tastes better than brewed. We weren’t sure we could make functional ingredients survive heat, but we did. Our blind test went 12/12 - honestly, I'm not sure I believe it still myself. And sugar. We use just 2 grams. Our team debated it endlessly. But here’s the truth: the “sugar-free” claims powered by RebM or Stevia might look good on a label, but they rarely taste good in your cup. From the start, we committed to being transparent. So we went with the real thing: Maple Sugar from a small Vermont farm where a group of friends turned 1,500 acres of forest into a sustainable sugarbush. It’s enough sweetness to make Vivi’s flat white (sorry, my biz partner is Aussie) taste amazing, without wrecking your health goals and NEVER leaving that brutal aftertaste. Feels good to see the world catching up to what we’ve been building. I'm curious, how do you sweeten your coffee? Whole Foods Trend Report link in comments ↩️