3 startups breaking conventions in coffee

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 307

News 1: Coffee without coffee beans? Yes, molecular! — Atomo

Atomo is a startup making ready-to-drink cold-brew coffee (in a can). Breaking a convention: They do not use coffee beans! “Molecular coffee” they call it. Atomo recently received a $40m funding round ($52m total). Date seeds and fruits/vegetables are the base for the molecular coffee and for reverse engineering the coffee taste. Opinion: Coffee reverse engineered to invent better flavours. A radical approach. It comes from software development, where it is sometimes necessary to think backwards from the final product to the code (“reverse engineering”). An established practise. Now for food-tech.

Oh, and by the way: Atomo is from Seattle, where a (now established) coffee innovator is coming from. Starbucks! A good sign for the company?

News 2: Coffee brewing reimagined — Ground Control

Brewing coffee has an iron-clad rule. Do not re-use the coffee grounds. Until Ground control. They invented a coffee maker with a new brewing process, using vacuums — and re-using coffee grounds in the process. The grounds are used up to 4 times in one brewing cycle to bringt out different elements of the coffee flavours, so they say. The machine looks like it is taken directly from a 1930’s Sci-Fi movie and is made for batch brewing in cafés or retail. So far US-only. Opinion: In urban areas coffee has been all the hype for the last decade, (re-)imagined in all possible ways. But even today there are new ways to approach coffee brewing — by breaking rules that everybody thought cannot be broken. That is true innovational spirit.

Ground control is San Francisco based — SLI trendscouters will visit the Bay Area in fall and will try for themselves.

News 3: $30m funding for luxury coffee brewing gear — Fellow

Fellow sells luxury coffee making gear on their website. They design and develop the products themselves, to “enable customers to make the best coffee at home”. The products and vision secured them a $30m funding in June 2022 (total funding of $40m). Opinion: Why such a big funding? Fellow is about beautifully designed coffee products, but it goes deeper. They give guidance for customers on how to use their products in the best way and add recommendations from coffee experts. It is “here to help”, a phrase we see more and more from tech companies like Google.

Fellow’s products have a clean, Apple-like, design — imagine Apple building a coffee machine.