Coffee Flour is made from processed coffee cherries.
A Seattle startup working with a pair of the world’s largest coffee companies is hoping to turn a product called Coffee Flour — milled from coffee cherry pulp — into big money.
Led by entrepreneur and former Starbucks technical services director Dan Belliveau, CF Global Holdings, Inc. has been backed by Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based invention incubator and patent security firm that has helped develop the supply contracts for the new product.
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The companies describe Coffee Flour as an ingredient for use in the food and beverage industries, claiming nutritional benefits such as high levels of protein, potassium and iron. Coffee Flour also contains caffeine, although the CF Global says the content is less per serving than what is found in a brewed cup of coffee. The product rollout is scheduled for 2015.
With a huge marketing launch today, CF Global is putting emphasis on the potential benefits of Coffee Flour to the environment, by diverting waste from coffee production, and to smallholder farmers, by returning a small portion of proceeds from retail sales to the farms.
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“Central to our business model is having the farmers and the mills share in the economics of this product,” says CF Global Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Andy Fedak. “So for every pound of flour sold a few cents is going to go to the mill, and a few cents is going to go to the farmer. We have that enshrined as part of the charter of this organization.”
The company is working with a couple of the world’s largest commodity coffee suppliers, including Ecom Coffee and Mercon, with operations currently underway in Hawaii, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Vietnam. CF Global hopes to eventually extend its source operations to virtually every coffee growing region in the world.
“Until today, coffee cherry pulp has been an unvalued byproduct resulting from the 17 billion pounds of coffee beans harvested around the world each year,” CF Global announced today. “Coffee Flour is produced by drying and milling the previously unvalued coffee cherry pulp, thereby creating a new and sustainable source of revenue for small-scale coffee farmers worldwide.”
Nick Brown
Nick Brown is the editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine.
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It is news to me that coffee cherry pulp is an “undervalued” commodity.
I Colombia there is only one(1) cooperative wet mill, all the rest are owned and operated by individual farmers!
The pulp is “highly valued”, since every finca(coffee farm) uses all of its pulp to make compost from it and in this manner supply the nutrients needed for the seedlings in the nurseries.
This sounds to me like a good money making scam that could possibly result in farmers having to buy plant nutrients in form of commercial fertilizers in order to nurture their seedlings. I would not be surprised at all that those mega companies “buy” the pulp for pennies and then sell the farmers expensive, poisonous and unsustainable chemical fertilizers, which in turn will cost the farmer way more than the few pennies they’ll get for their pulp.
It will also take extra infrastructure to get the pulp to mega processing facilities since it will ferment within 24 to 48 hrs, which I presume will make it worthless for “coffee flour”.
I also think that this “flour” will be used as a “filler” for all kinds of products, starting with coffee pods etc.
Sounds like a rip-off to me.
I am not clear as to the uses of coffee flour. why do we need this?
It has caffeine in it. So, I presume, it can be used in coffee pods in lieu of coffee and nobody would know except the folks making a good profit off that move.
It would be just another filler used in pods and capsules like chicory etc.
That is my take on that anyways. I smell the rat especially, since there is a lot of money behind it, which would not happen if there were not a lot of money to be made by those “investors”.
It’s called added value. It will get added to a category and will allow marketing to claim positives. Price will get raised , differentiate from competition etc. Like calcium in oj.hype