Meet Our Makers: Ollie Puddick, Founder of Innerbloom

Ollie Puddick is the Founder of Innerbloom, creators of high-performance coffee for the functional age.

This specialty RTD coffee is as smooth as the energy it provides, packing 15 grams of natural protein to make caffeine crashes a thing of the past. Featuring sweetly simple ingredients (that are superfoods in their own right) these functional coffees are an Australasian first, available in Mocha, Vanilla and Cinnamon Bun. 

C&C: Hi Ollie! Can you tell us a bit about the early days of Innerbloom? Where did the idea come from and how did the business get started?

Ollie: I got started in my own garage - the company has been around since 2021. I used to work a full time job as a fireman and previous to that, I lived in America where cold brew coffee was a big craze at the time. The bottled and canned coffee was everywhere. I used to bike to work every day, go past Whole Foods and grab a cold brew coffee. When I moved back to New Zealand, there was nothing like this available so I started making it myself. People would come over and try it and like it - I’d experiment with flavours and functional benefits, things like that. It got to a point where I thought ‘maybe I could start to sell this’. That’s the inception of Innerbloom. 

We started out in bottled coffee - I was making it and selling it at the markets myself week by week. This wasn’t sustainable in terms of time and the business model was pretty flawed in terms of scale and things like that. I knew if I wanted to turn it into a business, I had to get away from making it and move into selling the product itself. I managed to tee up with a contract manufacturer and the first products we produced were a black cold brew coffee with L-theanine and then a collagen coffee with cacao and coconut. Over the years, we’ve had a maca mocha which was a super random product (I thought it was a really good product! But it definitely wasn’t). We’ve come through a myriad of products. We started with cold brew coffee, then had cold brew, collagen, L-theanine and oat milk coffees - and now we’ve landed on a product range that we’re super happy with, which is the protein coffee and that’s our main focus. 

We released our vanilla protein coffee at the start of 2024. I’d had the idea for a while, didn’t really do anything with it and then decided to do a little test run. Within three months, we’d sold out of that vanilla protein coffee and had never sold a product so quickly. By the start of 2025, we’d removed all of the other coffees, just did the protein coffee and did a little rebrand to make it look like what it is today.

C&C: We’d love to know more about Innerbloom’s commitment to its functional ingredients - reading through your website, it comes across that the process of selecting which ingredients you use is very intentional. Can you tell us more about this?

Ollie: Obviously, when you make a product the price comes into play, but so does quality and the benefit. There’s a lot of stuff out there that has collagen in it, but only has one gram of collagen for example.

It’s more of a marketing play. Everything we do is very intentional, right down to the coffee. We source our coffee from a company in Central America, then contract roast in Auckland and we control that whole process right to the manufacturer. The brewing process is very similar to how you would brew a pour-over coffee on your kitchen bench, just at a mass scale essentially. The milk protein that we use is sourced from premium NZ dairy. When we did L-theanine products, we made sure that we used ethically sourced ingredients and suppliers. 

From a brand and founder perspective, it’s about having a touchpoint in those processes. You can go to a manufacturer or formulation specialist and they can tell you the cheapest way to make things - and you might accept that, but I think it’s nice to say to the customer that we know exactly what goes into the product. 

C&C: What has the process of getting Innerbloom ‘on the shelf’ and into retailers been like?

Ollie: New Zealand’s a different model compared to Australia. It’s very much grassroots and you can pretty much door knock your way into our major supermarket chain here. I went to my local supermarket and they generally tell you what you need to do - I’ve heard that this is the case if you’ve got a good product - you need to have a brand and be getting sales for them to take a punt on you because you’re basically renting shelf space off someone else. 

Once you’ve got an article code, you can sell to any of those supermarkets which is a really cool model. It’s been a very long process to get into other majors here, but we don’t have a heavy distribution model. We don’t really sell through distributors and a lot of it is direct. 

The Aussie process has taken a lot longer, as expected. We’re building trust in Australia, trying to work with the right distributors and work with them in the best way possible to supply them with everything they need for success because they are our touchpoint in Australia representing our brand. We’re slowly getting there! It’s going to take time, but the initial uptake and sales have been really good. 

C&C: In that process of getting the products ‘on the shelf’ and going through that evolution, how did you end up working with a distributor and why did you choose to work with Cartel & Co? 

Ollie: The main reason was to work with someone who is an arm of our business (especially because I don’t live in Australia) and it’s a great model - from a distributor’s perspective it’s a bit of a ‘pay to play’ and from a brand’s perspective, you’re taking a punt on the distributor by selling them your product and then working with them in the hope that they do the final piece, which is selling your product to the business or the store. 

There was no reason to use a distributor, but I was told that you can’t really go direct unless you’re going to the majors and we’re way too small to launch into majors yet. It was the next logical step. 

We were initially working with another distributor who established our brand, in a sense and then we outgrew them. I spoke with Hayssam (Founder, Cartel & Co) over a few years.

The Cartel & Co team seemed really well put together, they knew how to sell beverage and they understand where a drink needs to be, opening deals and how to sell it. They were the two main things that drew us to them.

C&C: If I was brand new to the Innerbloom world, which product would you recommend that I try first? 

Ollie: It’s hard to go past the Vanilla Protein Coffee. That seems to be everyone’s touchpoint. Most people either like vanilla or chocolate, it’s usually pretty 50/50. I would start with the Vanilla and if you’re not a vanilla fan, then definitely the Chocolate or Mocha. 

C&C: What do you envision for the future of Innerbloom as a brand?

Ollie: Our mission is pretty clear in terms of what we want to achieve. We want to be Australasia’s most loved and number one protein coffee brand - whether that’s establishing its own category in protein coffee or taking market share of canned and instant coffee. 

We don’t just want to be in every retailer - as much as that’s lovely, we want to have really good relationships with our suppliers, distributors and retailers to have a really healthy business. That’s it in a nutshell! We’re growth-focussed, but if that comes at the cost of diminishing our product or losing customers, it’s not worth it. 

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