A marketer walks into a coffee company
Jarrod Jordan runs Rarebird, a small specialty-coffee company whose entire pitch rests on paraxanthine - the compound your body makes when it breaks down caffeine. Rarebird calls the result "Px coffee" and, more memorably, the first-ever jitterless coffee. It is a strange, science-forward product to hand a career marketer. It is also exactly the kind of thing Jordan keeps ending up in charge of.
Consider the pattern. Before coffee there were smart earbuds. Before earbuds, sports nutrition and consumer brands. Before that, a marketing-technology startup he helped build from a conference room. The industries have nothing in common. The job always does: take something new, hard to explain, and slightly ahead of the market, then make people want it.
Rarebird was founded in 2020 by a Berkeley-trained bioengineer, Jeffrey Dietrich, who wanted coffee's lift without the crash. The science got the company patents, National Science Foundation grants, a Y Combinator stamp, and a spot in Buffalo's 43North accelerator. What science does not do on its own is move product off a shelf. That is the part Jordan has spent twenty years doing.
Marketing as a math problem
Ask around about Jordan and one word keeps returning: data. His public reputation was built on omnichannel marketing rooted in data science and quantitative analytics - the sort of phrase that usually puts a room to sleep, except that in his case it kept getting him invited on stage. He gave keynotes at the Forbes CMO Series in 2016, at CES in 2017, at the Amazon Web Summit and the Wearable Tech Conference the same year. The pitch was consistent: brand-building is not a feeling, it is a system you can measure.
That instinct also made him useful in front of a camera. He served as an on-camera analyst for hundreds of segments across Cheddar - reporting live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange - plus FOX News, ESPN, MSNBC and CNN. Networks like a marketer who can explain a complicated thing in ninety seconds without a slide. Jordan turned out to be one of them.
The four rooms he has worked
Bars reflect scope of role, not revenue. Compiled from public profiles and company statements.
From a room of four to a company of eighty
The most telling line on Jordan's resume is the smallest number. He was a founding member and Executive Vice President of Thuzio, a marketing-technology company started by former NFL running back Tiki Barber and Mark Gerson, the founder of GLG. Jordan was the client-facing executive on the hook for marketing and revenue. When he arrived, the staff numbered four. By the time it had spread across five cities, it was closing in on eighty.
Going from four to eighty is not a promotion, it is a different job every quarter. You are the pitch, then the process, then the person who hires the people who replace you in both. It is the sort of experience that teaches an operator the difference between a good idea and a company - a distinction that matters a great deal when your next product is a molecule.
Bragi made the Dash, an early truly-wireless smart earbud that arrived before the category existed in most shoppers' heads. As CMO, Jordan led the global expansion, and the company collected design and technology honors from the likes of iF Design, Red Dot, Google and Amazon. Selling an unfamiliar object to four continents is, again, the same job as selling jitterless coffee - just with a different thing in the box.
Supplements, then schools, then beans
Between the earbuds and the coffee came the consumer-brands years. From 2019, Jordan served as Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Digital Officer of Iovate Health Sciences International, the company behind a stable of well-known sports-nutrition and consumer brands, holding both titles at once until 2023. Wearing the marketing hat and the digital hat simultaneously is a tell: he is happiest where brand and data overlap.
He also spent time in the orbit of Noodle, the higher-education services company - another category, another audience, the same underlying craft. Then Rarebird, and the top job. The move from chief marketer to chief executive is a real jump. It swaps "make people want it" for "make the whole thing work." For a founder-adjacent operator who has already gone from four to eighty once, it reads less like a leap and more like the next logical rung.
It helps that Rarebird's problem is fundamentally a marketing problem wearing a lab coat. The science is handled - patents, grants, a metabolite the body already knows. What remains is the hardest sell in consumer goods: convincing millions of people to change what is in their morning cup. That is a Jordan-shaped problem.
A career in five moves
Small things that explain a lot
- His four categories - earbuds, supplements, education technology and coffee - share almost nothing except his belief that marketing is a quantitative discipline.
- He reported live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for Cheddar, then turned up on ESPN and CNN in the same career.
- He was a founding member of a company built by a former NFL running back and the founder of GLG.
- The company he now runs calls its product the first-ever "jitterless" coffee - a marketing line and a chemistry claim in three words.
- A Columbia University graduate, he has spent most of his working life based in New York City.