Brendan Smith was 19, a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania and a heavy drinker of double-shot espressos, when something went wrong during a late-night study session in a campus library.
"I was seated in the library, by myself, and I felt something happening so I moved myself down to the floor and I blacked out," said Smith, now founder and CEO of Joe'y, a Santa Monica-based coffee alternative sold nationwide. "I eventually came to on my own."
That episode set Smith on a path that ran through his Santa Monica kitchen, more than 100 formulations and a business his mother helped launch by pitching it to cafes without telling him.
Smith went on to see many cardiologists, including at Penn Medicine and in his hometown of Syracuse. Tests found nothing structural, and some doctors disagreed about whether he had experienced a palpitation or a true arrhythmia. One doctor, Smith recalled, said something to the effect that he had just had more irregular heartbeats in a minute than the doctor would have in a lifetime.
"I remember thinking these doctors were saying very different things, but they could all agree that coffee was a problem," Smith said.
The doctors told him to cut back significantly, but Smith found the alternatives lacking.
"It felt like the options were very high caffeine or decaf, and I just couldn't do decaf," he said. He tried tea and, for a while, tried "becoming a matcha person," but nothing stuck.
"I wasn't looking for a placebo. I needed energy. That was a non-negotiable," Smith said. "My doctors were telling me to cut back on coffee, but what they really meant was caffeine. All the alternatives were caffeine-free. There had to be a middle ground and there had to be a smarter caffeine out there."
"In the beginning, it wasn't drinkable," Smith said of his early kitchen experiments. "It's really hard to make the everyday superfood taste good."
Over about a year of development, Smith worked through at least 60 ingredients and screened suppliers for each. Ginger didn't make the cut.
"Incorrectly roasted dandelion can taste like grass. Roasted correctly, it tastes nutty and adds depth," he said. "But the difference in getting it right is a slim margin. It's the difference between one more minute of roasting."
When the variations became too close to tell apart, Smith brought samples to Main Street, outside his small rented office, and ran blind taste tests against coffee with friends and passersby.
"And then, you have to live with it for a while," he said. "You drink a formulation for a week and ask yourself if you could actually have it every day. You ask if it goes well with creamer. For a lot of formulations, you quickly find out the answer is 'no.'"
Joe'y contains 55 milligrams of caffeine, compared with roughly 95 to 200 milligrams in a cup of coffee, according to the company. Its ingredients include roasted chicory, dandelion root, cacao, lion's mane and ashwagandha.
The product's first convert was Smith's mother, Francie, a tea drinker who lives on the other side of the country. When she kept ordering Joe'y, Smith assumed she was just being nice.
"I thought I was going to go home and open a closet door and see all of the bags," he said.
Then his father, who had quit coffee because of mitral valve prolapse, started drinking it too. One day, Francie called to say her local cafe was putting Joe'y on the menu.
"She would really spend time with the baristas to ask them, 'How would you make it? What would you do here?'" Smith said.
"It's uncomfortable for me to say, 'You're going to try this and it's going to change your life,'" Smith said. "But my mom, Francie, was not only someone who's comfortable saying that, but had experienced it."
Six years in, the company remains rooted in Santa Monica, where Smith has lived for about 15 years and where Joe'y started in a Main Street office and a commercial kitchen.
"The foundation is here," Smith said. "If we ever had another office, it would be here."
From local cafes, the company expanded through its website and Amazon and recently signed with some major grocery retailers.
"We typically don't give numbers, but we plan to double next year," Smith said, adding that the company became more profitable this year.
Joe'y has never raised outside funding, so the company did everything itself, Smith said.
"I'd never intended to go into food and beverage, so I had a lot to learn there," Smith said, "but doing everything ourselves made it easier in the long run."
For more information, visit drinkjoey.com.