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Jarret Stopforth and Andy Kleitsch of Atomo, the non-coffee coffee.
By Dan Shryock
Open a chilled aluminum can and pour the contents into a glass. It looks like cold-brewed coffee. It smells and tastes like it, too. But there’s something completely different here.
This is what Jarret Stopforth and his Seattle-based startup Atomo Coffee call “molecular coffee.” Stopforth, a self-described “food hacker” with a Ph.D. in food microbiology, reverse-engineered coffee’s molecular structure to create a new drink made without coffee beans.
“This is not conventional coffee,” Stopforth says. “What’s in your cup is the extraction of roasted plant-based non-cellulosic materials. I’m converting it. I’m extracting it. I’m roasting it. I’m giving you the same compounds.”
The effort is attracting attention in the business world. After a Kickstarter campaign showed modest success, chief scientist Stopforth and company c.e.o. Andy Kleitsch were able to attract $2.6 million in a seed investment by Horizons Ventures in 2019. Another $9 million investment by Horizons and three other venture capital firms arrived in August 2020.
With the new money, Atomo Coffee is building a 12,000-square-foot roastery and production center in Seattle. The first product off the production line next year will be caffeinated cold brew containing 100 mg of caffeine per 8-ounce can. A typical cup of real coffee has 80-120 mg.
“Atomo Grounds” will eventually be available for conventional brewing.
“Coffee is among the most popular beverages worldwide, with roughly 42.6 liters consumed per person per year,” investor Tony Lau of Horizons Ventures said in a statement. “As the climate crisis intensifies, and the demand for coffee continues to rise, a more sustainable coffee is absolutely needed.”
Stopforth and Kleitsch think they have created one way to help satisfy increasing consumer demand for coffee-style drinks. The company cites what it calls underlying problems associated with large-scale coffee farming. Production demands and climate change combine to force expansion of farming operations and destruction of rainforests.
“There’s massive demand [for coffee] and it keeps increasing,” Stopforth says. “Production is struggling and the reason being is there’s a lot of deforestation happening. That’s helping to kill the climate.”
Dr. Chahan Yeretzian, a professor for analytical chemistry, bioanalytical chemistry, and diagnostics, and head of the Coffee Excellence Center at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, sees the Atomo project as an opportunity “to understand coffee better.”
“People focus on new experiences and the focus has shifted a little bit away from some religious rules to the experience of coffee, expanding the meaning of coffee,” Yeretzian says. “So, I think I was prepared for this kind of project in the sense that I always pushed people to do things that have been taboo in the past.”
What is upcycling?
The path toward Atomo’s non-coffee started in Stopforth’s garage where he’s “always tinkering and hacking things,” he says. “I drink a lot of coffee, and I started to get disappointed in coffee quality.”
That scientific hacking led him to identify what’s actually in a cup, the polyphenols, the micronutrients. For Stopforth, the focus was on the compounds extracted from a roasted coffee bean and not the bean itself.
Key to Atomo Coffee’s product development is the concept of upcycling. The Upcycled Food Association, founded last year, has established a definition: “Upcycled foods use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive impact on the environment.”
Atomo is upcycling plant waste products from American farmers. Think of leaves and stems and roots and pits in ag commodities today,” he said. He discovered that with the right processes, those components found in a cup of coffee could be replicated.
And, none of these plant products come from coffee trees.
The raw materials are washed, dried, and prepared. But before roasting begins, a proprietary technique targets key molecular compounds that replicate green coffee beans. The materials then are roasted, ground, and brewed.
The science
“We’ve identified the compounds that define coffee,” Stopforth says. “Now we’re taking all potential upcycled plant-based materials and selecting those ag waste streams that provide us with the same specifications as coffee. There has to be a match on the specification standpoint.
“And then, as the second part of that screening, it has to have precursor compounds that can be converted through biochemical reactions and roasting which happens when you ferment, roast, and extract coffee,” he explains. “We’re just inducing it. We are forcing it right onto other upcycled plant-based materials that typically wouldn’t go through that process.”
Through molecular wizardry, those extracted compounds are mixed and tested.
“We were just dialing things until we have something that is both sensory and analytically analogous to coffee,” he says.
The research
Stopforth’s experimentation could not advance to the consumer market without extensive research and development. For that, Atomo Coffee contracted with Yeretzian’s university research center in Switzerland to help. Atomo finances full-time research by Yeretzian’s three-person team.
“I have also been very interested in creativity and thinking out of the box and people who take risks, people who do things new, who challenge,” Yeretzian says, “Whenever you work at the border you better understand the product itself.”
Yeretzian, a member of the Atomo Coffee advisory board, likens the research to specialty coffee’s embrace of the cold brew innovation years ago.
“This is an essential project because it is a challenging project in terms of science,” Yeretzian continues, “but also in terms of putting in question things that are kind of traditionally taboo to the world of coffee. In a way, we are breaking the rules.”
The taste
Atomo Coffee calls its molecular coffee less bitter. A taste test by the American CNBC television network indicated 70% of consumers sampled preferred Atomo’s drink over conventional coffee.
“I think it’s good. It tastes like a good, filtered coffee,” Yeretzian says. “It is definitely not specialty coffee, like from Guatemala, but it is a good coffee that is liked by many people.”
That’s not to suggest the current flavor profile is a final product. Yeretzian emphasizes the research is only beginning. “At this stage, we want to prove that we’re able to reproduce a good coffee,” he says. “I would say that’s the major objective at this stage.”
Supporting sustainability
Combine the growing consumer demand with global warming, deforestation, and leaf rust, the future of coffee is in crisis, Stopforth says. “We’ve got to really protect coffee because we’re running out of it,” he says. “We [US consumers have no line of sight to that. We’re one of the largest coffee-consuming countries in the world, yet we don’t see the impacts. We don’t understand the threat. So, part of our mission is showing people. We want to alleviate the severe impact of the demand by providing an alternative that is as good and gives you the choice.”
Related: What Does Atomo Coffee Taste Like?