Coffee’s Next Wave Will Be Beanless
Can food scientists engineer a cup of coffee that’s better for people and planet? A new batch of VC-backed molecular ‘beanless’ coffee start-ups are trying to out-maneuver climate change and usher in the new age of faux coffee
This past October, at the 2023 New York Coffee Festival, the coffee world experienced the debut of Atomo Coffee, the world’s first lab-made espresso derived from superfoods. Meanwhile, San Francisco-based food-tech start-up Compound Foods—who has spent the past few years developing a new precision fermentation technique for their bean-free cold brew beverage, Minus Coffee—soft-launched in 2022. And the forthcoming Zero Coffee is working on a sparkling “cell-based” coffee.
Backed by tens of millions of VC dollars, Atomo Coffee, Minus Coffee, and Zero Coffee have all set out to climate-proof the coffee industry through groundbreaking food science that replicates coffee compounds at the molecular level to deliver delicious, ethical, and environmentally friendly coffee beverages that mimic the aroma, color, energizing benefits, and mouthfeel of drinks brewed from real coffee beans. These disruptive new entrants into the caffeinated beverage category are brought to you by climate change and groundbreaking food science. It's a bit of sci-fi food futuretopia, in which consumers enjoy all the functional and sensory pleasures of their favorite foods without the environmental guilt. By creating lab-made versions of climate-intensive products, like coffee, venture capitalists and scientists have essentially joined forces to engineer us out of the climate consequences of our coffee addiction and consumption habits by taking the entire coffee industry, from farmer to bean, out of the equation. Welcome to the dystopian age of faux coffee.
But why the sudden sense of urgency to create a climate-friendly cup of coffee? What happened to the lauded Third Wave coffee movement of the early aughts, with its focus on origin, bean quality, flavor, and supply chain transparency? With each passing season, it's becoming painfully apparent that the planet is getting hotter, and weather patterns are becoming more erratic. While erratic weather spells bad news for various industries, it's especially detrimental to the security of the global food supply chain. Climate change has already impacted the security of many popular foods, including coffee, and the situation is poised to worsen.
In recent years, there have been a number of alarmist headlines about the future of coffee production that all point to 2050 as the end of Earth’s “suitability” for growing Arabica coffee–the most widely traded bean variety on the planet. While there are over 120 varieties of the Coffea bean, Arabica dominates the $522 billion global commercial market. It's the bean variety that produces the aromas and flavors that consumers have come to associate with coffee. The commercial alternative would be the bitter but more resilient Robusta variety. However, to the dismay of the coffee world, things aren’t looking good for Robusta either.
In the not-too-distant future, coffee demand and coffee supply will not add up. Some 6 billion cups of coffee are consumed every day, and this number is expected to double by 2050. At the same time, experts forecast that today’s top coffee-growing regions will become 50% less productive within the next quarter century. While the severity of climate impact will vary by region, “The Arabica market is extremely threatened,” according to Christian Bunn, lead author of a 2015 ecological study on coffee and climate change. “There is rising demand. In the future, we’d need more area to grow coffee on, but we’re going to have less."
For anyone reading between the lines, it's clear the planet cannot keep up with the demand for coffee as we know it. In short, if climate, agricultural, and consumption patterns continue, coffee’s Fourth Wave may very well be beanless.
This equation spells trouble for the 125 million people in the Coffee Belt and beyond who depend on cultivating and trading the bright red fruits of the Coffea Arabica plant to provide for their families and communities. While the Third Wave coffee movement has bolstered both ethical and sustainable sourcing, and major players like Starbucks have invested in farmer education and experiments in more sustainable growing practices for over a decade, these efforts might be too little too late. Rising global temperatures, flooding, and agricultural disease also spell trouble for the end consumer: If current climate trends continue, coffee beverages brewed from real coffee beans may become a luxury good that’s financially out of reach for the billions of people who have come to enjoy coffee as part of their daily routine. As coffee roaster and specialty coffee industry vet Jordan Mongomery wrote in New Grounds Magazine last year, “Whatever the future holds, both coffee professionals and consumers will need to adjust their understanding and expectations of what a cup of coffee is and how much it costs.”
If the beanless coffee brigade at Atomo, Minus Coffee, and Zero Coffee have it their way, “adjusted expectations” will mean “adjusted for bean-free coffee” built to mimic the Arabica bean. Its “coffee” built on marketing, VC investment, and cutting-edge food science rather than coffee farmers and adaptive ecological practices that would allow us to continue drinking coffee derived from real coffee beans. This forthcoming supply and demand quandary is why millions of VC dollars are funneling into developing and promoting beanless coffee. Given the sheer size of the global coffee market, beanless coffee companies stand to make big bucks should their concept take off.
Currently in the early stages of development, Zero Coffee by Canadian investment platform Cult Foods Science aims to become the first-ever sparkling cellular coffee beverage. The company’s entire mission is to “advance the future of food” through the development and commercialization of cellular agriculture. When Zero Coffee hits shelves, the company aims to provide “more than a refreshment.” Instead, the product is being billed as “a better, more sustainable option for a planet under increasing pressure. Zero farm, zero harm, zero bean… all the benefits without the deforestation and massive plantations.”
Minus Coffee and Atomo Coffee are further along in their bean-free journey. Within the past year, both have made quiet launches on opposite coasts. Minus Coffee was founded by Maricel Saenz, a native of the coffee bean-producing nation of Costa Rica, who created the biotech company to guarantee “a future where coffee remains accessible to all while adapting to climate conditions.” Her company, which sells a canned, bean-free vanilla oat milk latte and a cold brew coffee at select retail chains in the Bay Area, has also received investments from Cult Foods Science. These canned beanless coffee beverages are derived from a mix of upcycled date pits, lentils, grape and sunflower seeds, chicory, and carob, which are roasted before being cold brewed in a fermentation extract.
The science and taste magic of Minus Coffee relies on a process called precision fermentation, a decades-old trick of synthetic biology that calls for fermenting genetically modified microorganisms in brewery-style tanks. (Only recently have food-tech scientists started experimenting with this process to create climate-friendly molecular copycats of consumable products destined for grocery shelves.) The result is a cold brewed coffee-bean-free caffeinated beverage that uses 94% less water and produces 86% less greenhouse gas emissions than a cup of coffee from the coffee bean.
Atomo Coffee, with its beanless espresso grinds, is poised to put the concept on the map in the coming months. After launching with Gumption Coffee in New York’s Times Square this past fall, the company expanded its footprint in April, partnering with cafes in Los Angeles, Seattle (where it is headquartered), Chicago, Boston, and Austin. Later this year, Atomo will be available at all 58 Bluestone Lane cafe locations across the U.S.
Scientists developed Atomo’s breakthrough molecular coffee through reverse engineering. They studied the hundreds of compounds that come together to generate the unique aroma, body, color, taste, and caffeine composition of a cup of coffee and, from there, sourced molecular copies of these compounds from alternative ingredients such as date, ramon, and sunflower seeds, lemon, pea protein, fenugreek, guava, millet, caffeine from green tea, fructose and baking soda. They even tried to adjust for taste and caffeine levels in their beanless grinds by reducing the bitter compounds in Atomo’s espresso blend to create an “ultra-smooth” cup of coffee and dialing in caffeine levels so drinkers can avoid the post-coffee jitters. Early blind taste tests conducted by Atomo showcase the bean as the clear favorite over a Starbucks blend, but with the product expanding across the U.S., we’ll soon see how Atomo performs side-by-side against real coffee beans in the open market.
The future of one of the world’s most consumed beverages is clearly in flux. If the prognosticated climate catastrophes come to the fore, we’ll either be drinking beanless brews each morning, or the beloved Arabica coffee bean will become a luxury good. The beanless coffee trend is in its early days, and time will tell whether customers will be willing to embrace it as part of a more sustainable future. Though the idea of faux coffee may have been gimmicky just a few years ago, the success and endurance of faux meat suggests consumer appetites for lab-grown foods have been whet. Beanless beverages have yet to mimic the exact flavor profiles as grown from the earth coffea beans, but as science advances, these faux products will, like wine, only get better with age.
And it's easy to imagine a future where consumers seek out a comforting cup of faux coffee, especially if the alternative is forgoing the beverage altogether. Welcome to the dystopian sci-fi beanless future of the next generation of coffee.