Dam Beverages | Growth spurt for plant-based beverages

The Montreal company is launching its products at retail and wants to expand its network of cafés.

While oat, almond and soy plant-based drinks are multiplying on grocery store shelves, Dam’s stand out from the rest because they come in concentrate form. The customer must reconstitute their drink by adding water.

There is 90% to 95% water in a bottle of plant-based drink, explains Dam founder Annie Lafleur, who emphasizes that there is no logic in transporting water from the point of production to the point of consumption.

Dam drinks are mostly used by independent coffee shops that buy them in small buckets. According to Annie Lafleur, about one in two lattes made in these shops today is a coffee that is not made with cow’s milk, that is, prepared with plant-based drinks, often almond, soy and oat.

In response to this continued growth, Dam is launching a first series of more convenient formats for consumers at home, Canadian oat concentrate sachets, on sale now online and at the end of the summer on the counters of cafés that use its beverages.

Annie Lafleur founded Dam in 2018 after a stint in Australia—she went there as part of her entrepreneurship studies at HEC Montréal. There, she worked in a café where she made the drink from almonds, which resulted in a fresh drink that tasted much better than anything she had tasted before.

So back home, she wanted to make the best almond drink possible. It was conservation constraints that led her to a concentrated version of the drink, which was more convenient.

The way it works is very simple: consumers add water to a paste. Once opened, the sachet can be kept for a year at room temperature. The reconstituted drink can be kept for a week in the fridge.

A Retail Breakthrough

Dam is therefore in the first phase of breaking into the retail sector. “I’m a staircase girl,” says Annie Lafleur, who adds that after independent cafes, her products should end up in independent grocery stores.

The small company with five employees, all women, wants to expand its distribution in a subsequent step, moving from small grocery stores to large chains.

At $25 for a sachet that makes 5 litres of drink, Dam compares to high-end (barista) products in the niche, with some cans priced much lower for plant-based drinks.

The growth phase also includes the arrival of a soy beverage, the favorite of consumers who are looking for a food with a high protein content (which almonds also are) and made with local ingredients and whose cultivation requires less water, like oats.

At the same time, Dam wants to increase the number of cafes that use her product. “We are currently talking to players who have several branches,” says the entrepreneur.

And the coffee counter giants?

Did Dam’s team hear Seattle’s siren song?

“It’s in our ambitions to go towards the big ones,” replies Annie Lafleur. “I don’t see why we should stay with the small ones.”