Coffee without the bean
Coffee comes in many forms – hot, cold, flavored and decaffeinated. But the idea of coffee without the bean – well that’s something new.
It’s called “molecular coffee.”
Atomo, a start-up located just blocks from the famous Starbucks in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, said it’s reverse-engineered the coffee bean. And if you’re wondering why, you’re not alone.
The idea started in serial tech entrepreneur Andy Kleitsch’s garage in 2018, when he and friend Jarret Stopforth, a food scientist who comes with decades of experience from the world of consumer packaged goods at major brands including Chobani and Campbell Soup, were talking about projects they aspired to work on.
“I told him, ‘I want to make coffee without the bean,’” Stopforth said. “And he said, ‘you’re blowing my mind, why would you want to do that?’”
The goal was to create a consistently perfect cup of coffee that is better for the environment, Stopforth said. He noted coffee farming has taken a toll on the rainforest. Also, most coffee is grown in certain latitudes and as the climate changes, farms are having to continually move higher, where there is less land.
To produce the molecular coffee, Stopforth and Kleitsch analysed “the big five” elements that contribute to the coffee experience – aroma, flavour, mouthfeel, colour, and bioactives (caffeine and antioxidants).
“For us, coffee is the big five. This is how you experience coffee, create the ritual, and the effect it has on you,” Stopforth says. “We looked at these components, and the oils and acids that make up coffee, then looked at ways to find upcycled plant-based materials with high-sustainability indices to bring in those compounds.”
Once they had a suitable product, Stopforth and Kleitsch tried the molecular coffee out against an established brand at the University of Washington. Kleitsch says seven out of 10 people preferred Atomo Coffee. A Kickstarter campaign was launched in February 2019, which hit its funding target within a week.
“Atomo Coffee raised money faster than any other start-up I’ve been involved in. We’ve really been blazing ever since, hiring people, building a lab, getting bigger and better every day,” Kleitsch says.
Atomo Coffee received a further funding boost of US$2.6 million in May 2019 from investment firm Horizons Ventures. The company has also added Dr Chahan Yeretzian of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) to its advisory board.
“Chahan directs the best Coffee Excellence Center in the world at ZHAW. We contacted him a while back to serve as an adviser and have had a number of discussions, visited him, and discussed our approach to making [molecular coffee]. He was interested to be a part of it,” Kleitsch says.
“We thought we’d see more of a backlash from the industry, but so far it has been overwhelmingly positive. Chahan’s stance was, as has happened in milk and meat with alternative solutions, so to should the coffee industry be open to alternatives.”
Kleitsch says Atomo is making new iterations of its molecular coffee every day, developing different formulas for ready-to-drink, espresso, and pour over coffee, and hopes to have a product on the market by 2020.
He adds that Atomo Coffee has the potential to boost coffee’s quality as well as its sustainable merits.
“Most people in the coffee industry know that coffee farming regions and environments are being heavily affected by climate change. In some cases, this is causing coffee to warm and ripen too quickly and lose flavour compounds, leading to problems with quality,” he says, adding that this can lead to deforestation as producers look for new ground.
“What we’d like is for coffee drinkers to get their coffee and not worry about the environmental impact. Atomo Coffee can provide that.”
