About Waka Coffee
Waka Coffee & Tea was founded in 2018 by David Kovalevski, who set out to make specialty-quality coffee as easy to prepare as a packet of instant. The company is headquartered in Walnut, California, and its flagship coffee line uses 100% Arabica beans that are freeze-dried rather than spray-dried, a slower and more costly process that preserves more of the bean's original aroma and flavor compounds instead of driving them off with heat.
Waka's single-origin Colombian instant coffee was scored 88 out of 100 by Coffee Review in a blind tasting, just a point below the highest mark that publication has given an instant coffee. Beyond coffee, Waka also sells instant tea and bulk coffee for hotels, offices, and short-term rentals, and its freeze-dried format is soluble enough to dissolve fully in cold water, which is what lets the same jar make both a hot cup and an iced one.
Brand website: wakacoffee.com
What Waka Coffee makes
Waka Coffee's range runs wider than the products we review. The lines we know best from our own testing are marked with a star:
Colombian Medium Roast Instant Coffee
Freeze-dried single-origin Arabica; the line featured in our testing — featured on Brew Gazette
Decaf Instant Coffee
Same freeze-dried Colombian process, decaffeinated
Single-Serve Travel Packets
Individually sealed sticks for travel, camping, and offices
Instant Tea
Unflavored and flavored instant tea powders and concentrates
Wholesale / Bulk Coffee
Bulk instant coffee for hotels, Airbnbs, and offices
Why we recognized Waka Coffee
The Brew Gazette Top Brand recognition isn't paid for and can't be applied for. We award it to the brands whose products consistently stand out in our hands-on category reviews. Waka Coffee earned it on the strength of the products below, evaluated the same way every product on this site is: bought, brewed with daily, and judged on what lands in the cup.
Waka Coffee products we rated highly
Waka Premium Instant Coffee, Colombian Medium Roast, 8 oz
Freeze-dried single-origin Colombian Arabica that keeps aromatics a hot spray-drying tower would burn off, with a clean caramel sweetness and soft red-fruit acidity in our cupping. It's fully soluble in cold water, making it one of the only instant coffees in our testing that turns into iced coffee with no clumping or warm-water step first.
Read the Best Instant Coffee of 2026 guide →What earned Waka Coffee the recognition
- Freeze-dried rather than spray-dried, a process that preserves more of the bean's aroma and flavor than the heat-driven spray-drying used by most mass-market instant coffee
- 100% single-origin Colombian Arabica, scored 88 out of 100 by Coffee Review in a blind tasting, one point below the highest score that publication has given an instant coffee
- Dissolves completely in cold water, letting the same jar make either a hot cup or an iced coffee with no clumping or sediment
- No added sugar, fillers, or artificial flavors in the coffee line
- Founded in 2018 by David Kovalevski with a focus on bringing specialty-coffee quality to the instant category