The Paper's trainee reporter Wang Jingjing
Coffee without beans, that's what Composite Foods plans to do after raising a $4.5 million seed round.
Compound Foods is an American startup that makes artificial coffee. Recently, Maricel Saenz, founder and CEO of Compound Foods, said that using synthetic biology to extract molecules to make coffee, the company can extract and recombine the taste of coffee beans from different regions, altitudes and processing methods.
Maricel Saenz
Different coffee beans have different flavors. Take the Starbucks Reserve as an example, there are Brazilian South San Tullio Gem Summer variety coffee beans, East Timor pearl coffee beans, Colombian La Unión coffee beans and so on. Compound Foods' goal is to be able to synthesize "coffee" of various flavors in the laboratory. At present, Compound Foods is still optimizing the formulation and expects to test the product on a small scale by the end of this year.
This idea is not the first time to propose, Seattle startup Atomo Coffee in 2019 proposed the concept of molecular coffee, that is, first analyze the composition of coffee beans, and then extract the various chemical molecules needed from plants other than coffee, and recombine.
After many trials, Atomo founder Jarret Stopforth discovered that "coffee" is mainly made up of 28 chemical components. Different varieties of coffee, the amount of each ingredient is different. After finding these ingredients, Jarret began looking for alternatives. He hopes to extract from natural foods, rather than "blending" the flavors of coffee in the lab. In addition, the supply of these alternatives must be more "stable" than coffee and have no impact on the environment.
As a result, 95% of the ingredients (by weight) of the raw materials it makes of artificial coffee come from sustainable plants that can be recycled, including watermelon seeds and sunflower seed shells.
The emergence of the concept of "artificial coffee" is inseparable from the shortage of global coffee raw material supply and the outlet of artificial food.
Brazil, the world's largest producer of coffee beans, has suffered from extreme weather such as frost and drought this year, which has affected the supply of coffee beans. Coffee trees are extremely sensitive to frost and drought, which can seriously lead to tree death, and if the coffee trees are replanted, it will take about three years to produce. As a result, Brazilian coffee bean prices soared, with Arabica coffee bean futures, which rely mainly on Brazilian exports, hitting a nearly seven-year high.
At the same time, due to the impact of the new crown epidemic, Vietnam, the world's second largest coffee producer, is still facing the problem of coffee export difficulties. On the one hand, there is a severe shortage of containers around the world and freight rates are soaring; on the other hand, as an important port in the global shipping network, ho Chi Minh City's long-term blockade has prevented Vietnamese exporters from transporting coffee beans to ports around the world. Against the backdrop of export difficulties, robusta coffee futures prices, the main force of Vietnamese coffee, soared to $2024 per ton, reaching the highest level in nearly four years.
The other two major coffee bean producers are Colombia and Kenya, and although they are not susceptible to extreme weather, heat waves and leaf rust are also disrupting the growth of local coffee beans.
In addition to the near-term worries of the epidemic, the supply of coffee raw materials is also worrying. According to the Daily Mail, farmers growing Arabica beans are abandoning the world's best-selling coffee variety in favor of crops such as sugar cane. Other farmers are forced to grow this fragile coffee variety in higher elevation and lower temperature farmland, as the increase in average annual temperatures has led to large areas of land no longer suitable for coffee cultivation.
A British study warned that "the current 50% of the land used to grow coffee will no longer be suitable for cultivation by 2050, and coffee farmers are abandoning coffee plantations, so future coffee production will certainly not be enough".
The supply of raw materials for coffee is tight, and the market is looking for artificial alternatives.
Nielsen research shows that as environmental awareness increases, 48 percent of U.S. consumers say they are willing to change their buying habits based on the sustainability of their products. In this context, the concept of artificial food represented by artificial meat and artificial milk has begun to rise, although the mention of artificial coffee has just begun, but capital has already smelled opportunities. Atomo has raised more than $10 million in its three years of existence, with several companies with extensive investment experience in agri-alternative food technology participating in the latest round of funding, including Li Ka-shing's Impossible Foods and S2G Ventures (Beyond Meat).
However, for consumers, the most concerned is how the artificial coffee tastes.
In a blind selection experiment comparing Atomo coffee with three other traditional coffee brands, including Starbucks and Japanese brand Boss, the results showed that while Atomo's coffee texture tasted a little watery, it tasted smooth and was no less than traditional coffee brands, or even surpassed them: it was less bitter than Starbucks and softer than strong Boss coffee.
Interestingly, in this test, the test subjects could not accurately distinguish between artificial coffee and coffee made from coffee beans.
Atomo said that artificial coffee is as close as possible to the level of natural coffee in the five dimensions of color, aroma, taste, viscosity, and active substances (caffeine, antioxidants, etc.).
The two founders of Atomo
Editor-in-Charge: Jingjing Wang
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