“Right now, we’re just making product as fast as we can,” said Otto, a 49-year-old stockbroker and financial adviser by trade.
Last month, Clearwater, Fla.-based coffee products provider Melitta announced it would offer JavaJig starter kits at grocery and specialty retailers starting Oct. 1. The announcement was a milestone on Otto’s two-year entrepreneurial journey.
In early 2010, Otto’s wife bought a Keurig coffee system, which punctures a plastic container of coffee — called a “K-cup” — and streams hot pressurized water through the cup to brew coffee.
Otto did the math and estimated that K-cup consumers spent more than $30 on a pound of coffee. (The containers hold about a third of an ounce of coffee, he said.)
He found himself losing sleep over how to build what he felt would be a better, less expensive single-cup system. After months of messy dismantling and reassembling, he found a way of sandwiching a filter between two parts — a filter form and an outer cup.
He and his partners hired a design engineer to measure parts and craft prototypes. “You need to secure that filter somehow,” Otto said.
Otto sent a self-made video explaining the process to Melitta and soon got an invitation to demonstrate the process himself. He flew down to Florida to do just that. (You can watch an updated video on JavaJig.com.)
“We sort of won the beauty contest,” Otto said. “They (Melitta) liked the way we skinned the cat.”
A spokeswoman for Melitta asked that questions be emailed to her, but did not offer a response as of Friday afternoon.
JavaJig LLC is now an original equipment manufacturer supplier to Melitta, which ordered an initial 175,000 JavaJig “starter kits.” Otto declined to put a dollar value on that order, but with the packaging help of Fairfield-based InnoMark and a Chinese manufacturer, JavaJig met the order in seven weeks, he said.
Otto sees several advantages. With the JavaJig’s three parts — filter form, outer cup and lid — and special filters, coffee-lovers can make their own K-cups. (They need ground coffee, of course.) Just throw away the compostable paper filters when finished.
Another advantage: Users get to put fresh-ground coffee into their cups. “Our product gives the ability to have a freshly brewed cup of coffee,” said Bill O’Neill, one of Otto’s JavaJig partners.
It takes some “work,” Otto acknowledged. But Melitta says using a single-cup JavaJig costs about 50 percent less per cup compared to pre-filled K-cups.
O’Neill agreed this moment is a good one for the new company.
“It’s obviously incredible, to go from just the idea to production to everything we had to do,” he said.
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