New beanless 'coffee' emerges but does it taste any good?

I am in a high-end coffee shop in a tech-heavy area of San Francisco, staring suspiciously into a cup of expresso. This is no conventional coffee: it is made without using a single coffee bean.

It comes from Atomo, one of a band of alt-coffee start-ups hoping to revolutionise the world of brewed coffee.

“We take great offense when someone says that we're a coffee substitute,” says Andy Kleitsch, the chief executive of Seattle based start-up Atomo, whose pure, beanless ground product my espresso has been made from.

Traditional coffee substitutes have a reputation for not tasting much like coffee and are usually caffeine-free.

But the newcomers intend to replicate one of the world’s most popular beverages from taste, to caffeine punch, to drinking experience – and the first of this nascent industry’s beanless concoctions have begun to appear.

They say there's a strong environmental argument for their beanless brews.

According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, coffee cultivation is currently the sixth largest cause of deforestation.

That impact is expected to widen as demand increases: consumption is fast rising in traditional tea drinking countries like India and China.

Meanwhile, climate change is pushing plantations to higher altitudes to escape the heat.

So, beanless coffee is potentially a less environmentally damaging alternative.

The newcomers also argue that, if scaled up, beanless coffee could be cheaper than its conventional competition.

And, with coffee prices reaching record levels on the international markets this year, that point is timely.

Also, in December, a new EU regulation is set to come into effect that outlaws the sale of products, coffee included, that can’t prove they are not linked to deforestation.

“A lot of big coffee companies are watching this field,” says Chahan Yeretzian, a professor of analytical chemistry, who heads the Coffee Excellence Centre at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Austria.

Niels Haak, director of sustainable coffee partnerships at Conservation International, an environmental non-profit, welcomes the innovative approaches to tackling coffee’s deforestation problem, but he also doubts if beanless coffee will be able to make much dent.

Coffee growing provides livelihoods and income to many smallholder farming families globally, he further notes. The conundrum is if they move away from growing coffee, they will likely instead turn to growing more coca – the plant cocaine derives from – which has similar deforestation issues. “There are no silver bullets,” he says.

He notes there is work ongoing – from coffee certification schemes, to efforts aimed at strengthening so-called shade coffee farming where coffee is grown under a canopy of other trees – to make coffee growing more sustainable and support communities. “[The coffee sector] is on a journey to transform,” he says.

Yet the beanless companies counter that transformation isn’t wide enough or quick enough. Coffee is causing massive deforestation and coffee farmers live in poverty.

If alt-coffee could offset even just the extra projected coffee demand it would be a win for the planet that wouldn’t put anyone out of business.

And, as the climate changes, there are plenty of crops beyond illicit ones that coffee farmers could switch to that don’t require slashing more forest.

Atomo, which launched in 2019, is currently sold in more than 70 coffee shops in the US.

Coffee shop chain Bluestone Lane added it to the menu at all its locations in early August, including in San Francisco.

Since June, Atomo has also been selling through its website a blend of beanless and conventional coffee intended for home brewing that I have also purchased to try.

It currently costs slightly more than premium conventional coffee. For example, to make my expresso with Atomo adds on 50 cents (38p).

Atomo’s ingredients aren’t particularly high tech: date seeds, ramón seeds, sunflower seed extract, fructose, pea protein, millet, lemon, guava, fenugreek seeds, caffeine and baking soda.

Things begin with waste date seeds or pits. Rock hard, they are granulated then infused with a secret marinade of ingredients from the list above, before being roasted to create new flavours, aromas and compounds.

Further ingredients then finish things off. Atomo’s caffeine is sourced from green tea decaffeination, though synthetically-made caffeine is also used to provide beanless coffee’s kick.

Atomo operates a facility in southern California, where the date pits are cleaned and washed, and a second facility in Seattle where the manufacturing takes place. Current capacity is four million pounds a year, which Mr Kleitsch describes as a “rounding error” in the world of coffee production: Starbucks buys about 800 million.

As for trying Atomo, both the coffee shop expresso and the brew-at-home version tasted close enough to good coffee for me. Perhaps luckily for these companies, coffee can have many different undertones.

Others have different ingredients and methods.

Over the past year the bean-free coffee products of Dutch start-up Northern Wonder, founded in 2021, has secured space on supermarket shelves in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Roasted and ground lupin, chickpea, malted barley, and chicory are amongst the major ingredients the company works with, along with an undisclosed natural flavouring.

Though notes David Klingen, the company’s boss, operations are still in the research and development phase. Ingredients may change as it perfects its brew.

Other companies on the scene include Singapore-based Prefer and San Francisco's Minus.

And, though it is further from market, also being pursued is the tantalising possibility of lab-grown or cultured coffee.

In the same way animal cells can be cultivated in a bioreactor and harvested to produce meat cell products – so cells extracted from coffee plants could be similarly grown, then fermented and roasted to produce a brew. Proof of concept was demonstrated in 2021 by Finnish government researchers, who are now trying to help accelerate commercialisation.

Cell-based coffee start-ups include Swiss-based Foodbrewer, US-based California Cultured, and Singapore-based Another.

The approach may provide a closer match to coffee than surrogates like Atomo or Northern Wonder, but regulatory approval for such novel food takes time and money. There are also doubts the technology will be able to scale economically.

Meanwhile, challenges for the beanless firms remain. The house-filling aroma that real coffee generates is still elusive for them. And bean-free coffee doesn’t provide emotional connections to faraway places – Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia – the way real coffee can.

Atomo’s main business hurdle now is finding large coffee partners who want to offer their consumers a new choice, while Northern Wonder’s is finding the right investors.

“People aren’t completely sure how big the category will be and when,” says Mr Klingen.

I don’t think I’ll be switching – I can’t help but like that real coffee is grown by people somewhere – but beanless coffee certainly left me thinking I should investigate the sustainability and ethics of my conventional brew.