Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/491365
28 STiR tea & coffee industry international Pulp problem Belliveau's work in coffee began at Starbucks Corporation, a company he joined after working on other large-scale engineering problems for more than a decade. As a proj- ect manager for Frito Lay he routinely considered the best use of potato skins and oil left over from making chips. In designing roasting plants, Belliveau said, "I learned very early on to be very comfortable with: 'Here's a problem. You're not going to find the solution in a book. You may find similar things or something that may relate to it in other areas but you're going to have to pull the six or seven disparate pieces of information together to get a solution for this problem.'" Belliveau credits Dario Scolari, chief executive officer of Scolari Engineering S.p.A, for pressing him to learn as much as he could about the chemical makeup of the coffee bean and roasting science. In his attempt to create coffee flour, Belliveau applied that pragmatic analytical technique to redesigning processes for handling pulp. "The first samples from Vietnam were done on a small system. It was fantastic: no mold, no yeast, no toxins; tasted great. When we milled it up, it worked fantastic in chocolate. We were, like, high-fiving down the hallways," he said. CF Holdings moved ahead with pilots in Vietnam because of these exciting results. But as they scaled up to commercial lots they discovered a mold problem. Vietnam coffee workers tend to do only one strip-picking pass during harvest, which means a lot of green coffee cherries get taken to the wet mill. Those cherries were ending up in discarded pulp piles, which while not a problem for processing green coffee destined to be roasted, was the source of the mold in the flour. The team was able to trace this back to what amounted to a pulp sorting issue. Once identified, the solution turned out to be quite simple. Running the pulp through a standard destoner removed moldy green cherries. CF Holdings used a sys- tem designed by Probat for roasted beans to test this new quality assurance step. In Nicaragua, they tried a unit made by Maquinaria Industrial Joca, S.A. a Costa Rican equipment manufacturer. The process uses an air flume to take advantage of the fact that "the pulp, once it's dried, is lighter than the stones or the dried green cherries with the beans in them. So both of those things fall out and the pulp goes up," said Belliveau. Food from waste Solving problem with mold was just one of many challenges along the way to making a food source from coffee waste. Others included figuring out how to capture the pulp from the depulpers, a method which Belliveau and his partners at ECOM Agroindus- trial Corp. Ltd., Intellectual Ventures and Mercon Coffee Group are keeping secret for now; developing a mechanical drying process; and working with lauded chefs to create recipes that use Coffee Flour. Perhaps the biggest challenge of all was foundational. For Belliveau, it was impor- tant that the process for producing this food product not require processors to buy new equipment. He also wanted to ensure coffee growers get their share of the new revenue and for domestic markets to develop this novel food at origin." It took months to build the necessary language into CF Holdings partnerships. Where bio-gas failed, will Coffee Flour succeed? It is too soon to tell. Recipe devel- opment continues and, for now, the only places the general public can try Coffee Flour baked goods are in Seattle, Wash. at Crush and Miller's Crossing or in Vancouver, BC at L'Abattoir Restaurant. How about coffee sun teas as a category? Small quantities continue to arrive in North America and a few consuming countries from farms in Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, and Yemen. To become economical and upcycle a significant amount of pulp, suppliers would have to order four to five thousand times the amount currently being sold by Café Imports. Belliveau may be on the right track with clever use of existing processing equip- ment, a willingness to keep adapting and a business model that shares the wealth with those at the bottom of the supply chain. Grounds Diversion Innovative ways to reuse coffee grounds Compost Coffee grounds have long been loved by gardeners who mix grinds for use with plants that prefer higher acid soils. The internet is full of recipes for mixing lye and coffee waste to create a composting agent. Do-it-yourself bloggers have even shared pictorial essays on how to make seed starter pots of coffee grounds that decompose in the garden bed. Biofuel Transesterification is a big word to sum up the chemical process involved in con- verting the oils leftover from brewing to gas. A few folks in the UK hope to make biodiesel from coffee grounds. One re- cent study concluded that a small cof- fee shop could make about two liters of biofuel per day. Bio-bean Ltd has already begun selling this fuel to businesses in London. Booze Portuguese scientists created a powder by drying coffee grounds. Then, they extracted left-over flavor compounds by re-introducing it to very hot water. After removing remaining solids, they added sugar and yeast and let it ferment. The last step is to augment it further with eth- anol. Coffee cocktails anyone? Milk Starbucks Coffee partnered with contact lens manufacturer Menicon Co., Ltd. to "close the loop" and create a food for cows from coffee grounds. In a joint ven- ture with the Veterinary Medicine Depart- ment of Azabu University, they used a lactic acid fermentation process to make bean cakes which when fed to cows pro- duce a high quality milk. Tech Fabrics Singtex, a Taiwan company, recently won an award for one of the high-tech fabrics it makes using coffee grounds. The S.Café fabrics have already made it into the uniforms of Liverpool FC, a team in the English Premier League. Other brands using the fabrics include Ex Of- ficio, Hugo Boss, Timberland and Umbro.