OUR STORY
Four friends.
One honest cup.
It started the way most good things do — a shared obsession, and a problem worth solving. Between us we cover the whole spectrum of coffee drinkers.
NO. 1
The instant one
Just wants something quick — no ceremony, no fuss.
NO. 2
Iced all year
Cold brew in January. Yes, even then.
NO. 3
The purist
Clocks a great cup from a merely good one in a single sip.
NO. 4
The label reader
Pays attention to what actually goes in the cup.
Chapter one
We tried doing it the right way.
We bought whole beans, invested in grinders, and tried to dial in the perfect brew. The problem? Great coffee is genuinely hard to get right.
Beans go stale faster than you'd think — most are past their peak by the time they reach your kitchen, and unless you're brewing several cups a day, you'll rarely finish a bag while it's fresh. The grind, the ratio, the temperature, the timing — it's a craft, and frankly not all of us have the time or talent to do it justice at 7am on a Tuesday.
THE COST
So we just paid for quality,
and $6–8 a cup adds up fast.
For a while, paying was the answer. But when coffee is part of your daily routine, that's an expense that's hard to justify indefinitely — no matter how good the cup.
Chapter two
Then we noticed the plastic.
Conventional pods, espresso machines, disposable cups — they're essentially tiny plastic hot tubs, leaching microplastics straight into your cup the moment hot water hits them.
THE TURN
Freeze-dried changed the whole conversation.
After a lot of dead ends, we went deep on sourcing — sampling products, studying processes, holding everything to a standard we'd be glad to put in our own cups every single morning. What we found checked every box.
01
Quality
Pure, single-ingredient coffee. A genuinely great cup, without the involved process.
02
Clean
No plastic, no microplastics. Nothing leaching into your morning.
03
Convenient
Hot or cold in seconds, and easy enough to take anywhere you go.
Chapter three
Then we started sharing.
We ordered a large bag, portioned it into single-serve packets, and passed it around. Friends tried it. Then their families. Then those families started asking where they could get more.
Somewhere in the middle of all those requests, it became clear we weren't the only ones who'd been waiting for this.
THE NAME
Mezza
“Half,” in Italian
We'll admit it: we also fell for the cup — a half-ounce single serve, almost too neat to turn down. So we named the brand for it. (And if a certain Seattle giant can borrow Italian for its cup sizes, we figured we'd earned the right too.)
No shortcuts. No compromises. Just the best cup we could find – shared with anyone who refuses to settle.
— The four of us, Mezza
Read more about our process