Zoe CorbinI’m staring quizzically at a cup of espresso at an upscale coffee shop in the tech heartland of San Francisco. This is no ordinary coffee: It’s made without a single coffee bean.
It comes from Atomo, one of a group of alternative coffee startups looking to revolutionize the world of brewed coffee.
“We get really angry when people say we’re a coffee alternative,” said Andy Kleitsch, CEO of Atomo, a Seattle startup whose pure, bean-free grinds are used to make my espresso.
Traditional coffee alternatives don’t taste much like coffee and are usually caffeine-free.
However, newcomers are aiming to replicate one of the world’s most popular beverages, from the taste to the caffeine punch to the drinking experience — and the first bean-free beverages in this nascent industry are already starting to appear.
atomThey say their soy-free beer has strong environmental benefits.
According to the World Wildlife Fundcoffee cultivation is currently the sixth leading cause of deforestation.
This impact is expected to grow as demand increases: tea consumption is growing rapidly in traditional tea-drinking countries such as India and China.
At the same time, climate change is forcing plantations to move to higher altitudes to escape the heat.
Therefore, bean-free coffee may be a less environmentally damaging alternative.
Newcomers also say bean-free coffee could be cheaper than traditional coffee if it scales up.
and, Coffee prices hit record highs Judging from the international market this year, this is very timely.
In addition, in December, New EU regulations The bill that will come into effect soon will ban the sale of products, including coffee, that cannot be proven to be free of deforestation.
“A lot of big coffee companies are looking at this space,” said Chahan Yeretzian, professor of analytical chemistry and director of the Center of Excellence in Coffee at Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland.
Nils Haake, director of the Sustainable Coffee Partnership at the environmental nonprofit Conservation International, welcomed the innovative approach to tackling coffee deforestation, but he also doubted whether bean-free coffee would make much of a difference.
He further noted that growing coffee provides livelihoods and income for many smallholder farmers around the world.
The problem is that if they stop growing coffee, they will turn to other crops or land uses. In some countries, they may even turn to illegal activities such as growing coca (the plant from which cocaine is derived), which has similar deforestation issues.
“There is no magic bullet,” he said.
He noted that work is underway to make coffee farming more sustainable and support communities, ranging from coffee certification schemes to efforts to strengthen so-called shade coffee farming – where coffee is grown under the canopy of other trees.[The coffee sector] It’s on a transformation journey,” he said.
However, bean-free coffee companies counter that the transition is not widespread enough or fast enough, that coffee is causing massive deforestation and that coffee farmers are living in poverty.
If alternative coffees can offset the projected additional coffee demand, then that’s a good thing for the planet and won’t put anyone out of business.
And, as climate change changes, coffee farmers could grow many other crops in addition to those grown illegally, without cutting down more forests.
atomAtomo was launched in 2019 and is currently sold in more than 70 coffee shops in the United States.
Coffee chain Bluestone Lane added it to the menu at all its locations, including San Francisco, in early August.
Since June, Atomo has also been selling a bean-free and traditional coffee blend for home brewing through its website, which I also purchased to try.
It currently costs slightly more than good quality conventional coffee – for example, an espresso made with an Atomo costs 50 cents (38p) more.
Atomo’s ingredients aren’t particularly high-tech: date seeds, ramen seeds, sunflower seed extract, fructose, pea protein, millet, lemon, guava, fenugreek seeds, caffeine, and baking soda.
It all starts with discarded dates or date pits, which are hard as a rock and pelleted, then soaked in the secret marinade listed above and roasted to create new flavors, aromas, and compounds.
Other ingredients then round out the coffee. Atomo sources its caffeine from decaffeinated green tea, but also uses synthetic caffeine to give it a bean-free coffee taste.
Atomo has a plant in Southern California that washes and cleans the date pits, and a second plant in Seattle that produces the dates. Currently, it produces 4 million pounds of dates a year, which Mr. Kleitsch says is just a “rounding error” in the world of coffee production: Starbucks buys about 800 million pounds of dates a year.
As for trying Atomo, both the coffee shop espresso and the brew-at-home version tasted close enough to good coffee for me. Maybe these companies are lucky because coffee can have a lot of different undertones.
Northern MiracleOthers have different ingredients and methods.
Over the past year, bean-free coffee products from Dutch startup Northern Wonder (founded in 2021) have found a place on supermarket shelves in the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Roasted and ground lupins, chickpeas, malted barley and chicory are the main ingredients used by the company, along with an undisclosed natural flavoring.
However, owner David Klingen said the business is still in the research and development phase and that the ingredients may change as the brewing process is refined.
Other companies entering the space include Singapore-based Prefer and San Francisco-based Minus.
Although still some way off from market, the tantalizing possibility of lab-grown or cultured coffee is also being pursued.
Just as animal cells can be grown in bioreactors and harvested to produce meat cell products, cells extracted from coffee plants can be grown in a similar way, then fermented and roasted to produce coffee. Confirmed in 2021 Finnish government researchers are trying Helping accelerate commercialization.
Cell-based coffee startups include Foodbrewer in Switzerland, California Cultured in the U.S. and Another in Singapore.
The approach may be closer to coffee than alternatives such as Atomo or Northern Wonder, but regulatory approval for such new foods takes time and money. There are also doubts whether the technology can be scaled economically.
Northern MiracleMeanwhile, the challenges facing beanless coffee companies remain. They still can’t capture the room-filling aroma of real coffee. And beanless coffee can’t create the emotional connections to faraway places — Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia — that real coffee can.
The main business hurdle Atomo currently faces is finding a large coffee partner willing to provide consumers with new options, while Northern Wonder is looking for the right investors.
“People aren’t entirely sure how big this category is going to be and when it’s going to be,” Mr. Klingen said.
I don’t think I’ll change that mindset – I can’t help but love that real coffee is grown by people somewhere – but bean-free coffee does make me think I should look into the sustainability and ethics of traditional brewing.
