MPE: Perfecting the Grind

By Peter Keen

Coffee is a commodity crop, but today’s consumer demands an ever-improving and more varied premium product. And gets it. There’s now almost an implicit 28th amendment guaranteeing the constitutional right to good coffee. Daniel Ephraim, the c.e.o. of Modern Process Equipment (MPE), comments that “60% of all coffee now sold in the United States is of a premium variety.  Thirty-five years ago, this number was 5%.”

Coffee starts out as a green bean and ends up as particles. The steps in between are loosely termed “processing”, but they must be value multipliers. If the bean is treated as a commodity, the result is predictable, and no amount of marketing will prevent coffee lovers exercising their right and going elsewhere. It’s not enough in such a competitive market where buyers have well-educated taste buds just to “add” value.

The key is to multiply it. The core of multiplication is in perfecting the grinding and integrating it into the full operations stream. That stretches from receipt of the green bean and transporting it to the machines so that its aromatics and volatiles are preserved through to packaging it as filter, pour over, capsule, pot, etc., and differentiating it as macchiato, Turkish, light roast, cold brew, Cubano, and other yet to appear exotics, blends, and fusions.

Ephraim describes “perfecting the grind” as both art and science. The art is in the flavor creation and the science in machines that operate closer to the molecular level than the bean. The cellular walls of ground coffee particles are around 30 microns in diameter. Extracting, without over-extracting, the soluble solids from the colloidal structures of the cells is “the secret sauce” of coffee brewing.

Grinding creates the ingredients for the sauce: microscopic particles. The particles must be perfectly balanced to suit the brewing method. That includes being standardized in their output from the grinding equipment, even though the exact composition of the input green coffee will vary. Brewing is highly sensitive to particle surface area, which means that optimal quality depends on precision and consistency in tailoring the grind size to the brewing method.

This is very much a matter of small is beautiful. The value multipliers are substantial. There’s 600% difference between a coarse filter brew grind where the average particle size is 800 microns and the retail value 2-3 cents a gram, to a 550-micron capsule grind generating 4-5 cents a gram, up to a 300-micron espresso grind at 12 cents. This translates to $11/lb. for coarse to $20/lb. for drip to $54/lb. for single-serve espresso. The standard example for getting a sense of what micrometer (the full term: millionths of a meter) measures translate to is that a human hair averages 75 microns. So, in this example, reducing particle size from 10 hair widths to four multiplies the coffee value by factor of 6.

The technology needed here is obviously complex in the basic science and in the engineering. There are multiple factors to balance and trade-off, including coffee density control, time calibration in high-speed packaging and minimizing temperature rise in processing. This is beyond manual adjustments and human calculation. It requires sophisticated hardware-software integration in PLCs: programmable logic controller systems. It also demands expertise in coffee as well as machines.

Modern Process Equipment is a leader here and has built on its grinding equipment foundations that span 60 years to extend the value multipliers backward in the process sequence to conveying the coffee to the machines and just this month forward to packaging the particles. These are a form of co-innovation between the customer as almost a think tank of ‘What ifs?’ ‘How abouts?’ and, ‘Can we find a way to?’

MPE’s Chain-Vey conveying system introduced a decade ago transformed moving coffee and other products in a way that enabled customer innovation. It eliminated the exposure to oxygen – “the enemy of coffee” – and a rapid decrease in the freshness of the coffee. It also ensured the uniformity of particle sizes and eliminated particle declassification.

MPE’s patented Vortex Superhomogenizer similarly breaks open current limits and thus enables customers to innovate. It is targeted to perfecting the density level for coffee capsules. Its main and industry-leading achievement is in normalization: doubling the densification of particles, thus increasing the amount of coffee capable of fitting into a capsule. MPE is the global leader in precision particle reduction equipment.

The newest transformation limit-breaker is called “In Situ”, announced in March. It enables grinding at the point of packaging, which opens many areas of process, service and supply chain innovation. In Situ, of course, means “in place” and for a business “where you want it.” It puts the grinding machine on top of the packing equipment. The limit breaker here is “without flattening the packager with a 10,000 lb. grinder or compromising the speed and quality of the grinding technology.”

MPE’s c.e.o. points to examples where major product innovation was enabled by grinding transformation: Turkish coffee and capsules, for instance. For Turkish coffee, every single bean must be turned into 30,000 particles. With MPE machines producing a thousand kilograms per hour, that adds up to around 150 billion particles hourly. Obviously, the value multiplier is in the equipment and the expertise embedded in its PLC software and sensors. MPE has the lion’s share of the Turkish coffee grinder market. “Because Turkish coffee is put directly into the water, of those billions of particles we need to ensure there is not even one that is oversized, or it will float and result in a poor drinking experience.”

It took many years for the capsule market to produce high-quality single-serve coffee. Again, the grinding innovation enables product innovation. Scott Will, MPE’s director of business development, summarizes the challenge that had to be met: “It’s the difference between walking on a tightrope versus an open sidewalk. You must be perfect in your execution of grinding. You’re dealing with exact brewing times and very small amounts of coffee in a fixed volume at high density. Everything has to line up perfectly,” says Will. Temperature increases from the running of the equipment during the day can throw off production. Misestimation in settings may throw out expensive coffee and pods.

The market for innovation in grinding equipment, integrated systems, and processing expertise seems likely to expand with the variety of the innovators in serving the consumer. For the giants, it is part of capital investment for scale production. Primary growth players would be the many medium to large firms that service restaurants, smaller specialty producers and processors, and suppliers to the international coffee growth markets aiming at millennials.

The business imperatives for coffee are: Escape the commodity trap. Innovate or die. MPE illustrates the power of co-innovation here: Break the limits that constrain your customers and enable them to exploit new value multipliers.