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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

chai

Move Over Coffee Pot, Chime Is The Keurig For Chai

Coffee gets all the glory – the fancy machines, the social media memes, the cute mugs. But outside the U.S., different forms of tea are even more popular than coffee. First created in India, chai tea is renowned for its unique, spice-based flavor and has a cult-following of devotees across the globe. The team at Camellia Labs believe that the chai tea latte is just as special as a cup of coffee and deserves its own unique experience and they inveted Chime, the first authentic chai tea brewer to create just that.

INTRODUCING CHIME - AUTHENTIC CHAI IN 3 MINUTES!

Like a Keurig or similar cup-based brewing machine, Chime is a single touch brewer. Chime simmers milk for the beverage while combining whole tea and spices in a brewing chamber. When the two are ready, the milk and steeped tea come together for the ultimate chai tea. The machine uses recyclable capsules called Chime Caps that are filled with Indian tea, similar to K-Cups. The current flavor lineup includes black tea, cardamom, ginger, cardamom ginger, and masala.

Chime lets users tweak the temperature, strength and milk content of the beverage to further customize their chai tea latte. The system adapts to a user’s chosen preferences and remembers for the next cup. With Chime, Camellia Labs is looking to increase the chai market presence and make chai tea more accessible to people who are currently unfamiliar with the drink to create a whole new wave of fans of the unique beverage.

To learn more about Camellia Labs and Chime, visit http://brewchime.com/

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Here’s The Most Exciting New Coffee Tech Of 2017

Ready for a jolt of innovation with your morning caffeine fix? Good thing, because 2017 looks like it could serve up a double shot of disruptive coffee technology.

Due to a combination of emerging taste trends, technologies, and good timing, 2017 is shaping up to be an exciting year in the world of coffee. Here are the products that I’m most intrigued about:

Spinn Coffee

(Update: Read my November 2017 update on the status of Spinn here). Spinn Coffee is a San Francisco startup that is expected to ship its centrifugal brewing system this summer to early backers.  The Spinn coffee maker uses the same centrifugal technology that Nespresso uses in its Vertuoline coffee and espresso maker line (Nespresso licenses the technology from Spinn), only instead of creating a centrifuge within the pod, the Spinn uses its patented technology within an internal centrifuge system.

The new machine will grind whole beans for each cup and brew the consumer’s choice of espresso or drip coffee. The centrifuge spins the brewing coffee spins at a high rate within the chamber to extract flavors from the ground coffee beans.

As would be expected from a modern coffee maker, the Spinn is connected and app-controllable. The company is also working to develop a coffee marketplace that delivers beans from local roasters. While the first batch of Spinns is sold out, the company has made a second batch available for preorder that is expected to ship in the second half of this year.

Spinn - The key to the Best Cup of Coffee

Bonaverde Berlin Roast-Grind-Brew Machine

(Update: You can see our November 2017 video review of the Bonaverde Berlin here). Bonaverde is one of the connected kitchen’s longest running crowdfunding sagas, having raised funding for its roast-grind-brew coffee machine back in 2013. While over two years late, the company finally started to ship to beta testers (aka Kickstarter backers) and are fine-tuning the product for a broader release.

The Bonaverde Berlin is a unique idea and will test just how far coffee lovers will go for a unique cup of coffee. While the home coffee roasting movement has picked up steam in recent years, the typical method for home roasting is to use a dedicated home roaster.  By combining roast-grind-brew into one single device, the Berlin will certainly provide extra convenience and space savings for those interested in home roasting, but it’s too soon to tell how many average consumers are willing to go this far for a unique and fresh cup of coffee.

The Berlin, which will be available to non-Kickstarter backers at the end of this year, will run for $800 or more at retail. The device requires its own special filters to mask the roasting smell as well as – at least initially – that you purchase the coffee pouches from the company that can cost between $1 and $5.  Consumers will eventually be able to insert their own beans to roast, but for now users of the Bonaverde will need to buy their green coffee through the Bonaverde curated marketplace.

You can watch a CNET video review of the product below.

Seva Coffee

In many ways, Seva is a similar concept to the Bonaverde Berlin in that it has created a roast-grind-brew machine that starts with green coffee beans and delivers a full cup of coffee, but the main difference being that Seva uses a proprietary capsule system. The capsules, which are compostable (unlike traditional Keurig based pod system), will allow the user to create a single cup of coffee, unlike the Bonaverde system which brews between 5 and 8 cups with a pouch of their coffee.

Pricing and availability for the Seva Coffee machine are currently not available.

Dash Cold Brew Coffee Machine

While companies like Toddy have enabled consumers to make cold brew coffee at home for decades, a recent surge in interest in the low-acidity coffee brewing method has some wondering if there’s a faster way to make coffee than the usual 8 to 12 hours required for a cup of cold brew.

Enter Storebound, the company behind the PancakeBot and the SoBro connected coffee table. The company showed off a prototype of its Dash Rapid Cold Brew Coffee Maker at the Housewares Show, a device that is expected to short cut the process of cold brew coffee to 10 minutes.  According to Digital Trends Jenny McGrath, the Dash Cold Brew machine uses something called ““cold boil” and lots of filtration.”

Storebound isn’t the first company to take a swing at a quick cold brew machine. First Build, the incubation group for GE that created the Paragon precision cooker, had a fast cold brew prototype called the Prisma that it came about $3 thousand short of funding on Indiegogo last fall, which caused them to put the brakes on development.

Chime Chai Tea Maker

Ok, so admittedly I’m cheating here by including a chai maker, but hey, who doesn’t like chai tea? The Chime connected tea maker, which is expected to start shipping later this year, uses a pod-based system that allows you to brew a highly optimized cup of chai.

Jacked-Up Nitro Cold Brew Keg System

Since so many us like our beer to taste like coffee, it’s only natural that we’d eventually have coffee that tastes like beer.  Or, at the very least, coffee that has a Guinness-like head in the form of nitrogen-injected coffee.

While nitro-injected coffee has been gaining in popularity in recent years, it’s still hard to find unless you live near an adventurous coffee bar. But don’t worry, you can always make nitro-coffee at home if you’re willing to try some of the early nitrogen coffee makers such as the Jacked-Up Nitro. The system, which is available online through a home brew specialty retailer, is available today for $230 and looks fairly straightforward to operate.

However, being the tech nerd that I am, I’m still on the hunt for a home nitro system that is connected and doesn’t require me to go to a home brew specialty shop. Who knows, maybe there’s an innovative startup (hint hint) that will create one that I include in my top coffee tech list of 2018.

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Chime Wants To Make You A Cup of Chai With Its Connected Brewer

Some say it’s important to be focused when you’re a startup. Chime is planning to put that theory to a test with its first product: an app-controlled chai brewer.

How does the connected chai maker work? The Chime makes chai tea by using individual chai tea pods (called caps) and allows the consumer to adjust the milk ratio and the strength of the brew.

You can watch the Chime in action here:

In a way, this kind of focus makes sense. There are hundreds of nearly indistinguishable coffee makers on the market but exactly none – at least that I know of – push-button chai brewing machines. Chai also requires a little more work than your traditional Earl Grey type of cup, which means some might be willing to pay for the convenience of a chai-bot.

Is the market big enough? Chime founder Gaurav Chawla believes so, pointing out that the US chai market is $1 billion. While that’s a fraction of the $90 billion global tea market it’s substantial nonetheless, especially if there aren’t any specialized pod-based chai brewers currently on the market.

Still, there will be challenges. I believe the biggest test for Chime will be getting consumers to trust a startup enough to be willing to bet on them as the sole source of their chai tea. Chime requires the end user to buy the chai caps – which will cost 90 cents a piece – from the company itself, not a big deal when you’re Keurig or Nestle, but a bit more of a leap of faith if you’re a startup.

Either way, I’m interested to see how Chime does later this year when they ship. I caught up with Chawla to ask him a few questions.

See his answers below.

Wolf: When is Chime expected to ship?

Chawla: Chime is expected to ship towards the end of the year.

Wolf: Do you have any retail relationships established?

Chawla: We do not have retail relationships currently. Our plan is to sell directly to the consumers initially.

Wolf: Can you tell us anything about the typical profile of the preorder customer for Chime?

Chawla: Our typical customer is tech savvy chai lover who knows what real chai is and cares about the taste of chai and the ingredients that go into making a great cup of chai. Our consumer cares about the quality of chai and wants to make their life easier by having a device that can make their chai without all the hassle. Our typical pre-order customer doesn’t shy away from new technology and believes technology exists to make their life easier.

Wolf: Your business model looks like it will depend on your own modules (Caps). How do you expect to raise awareness? I also expect some would have doubts about a startup as sole provider of chai – how will you overcome these doubts?

Chawla: We are doing online community building but we will also be doing events and taste testing from time to time. We have already started testing the tea blend and we will come up with a variety of tea blends. We chose from high quality tea and are working with tea suppliers who supply to big brands. We have already started establishing our tea supply chain and we will test it out before we launch.

Wolf: Have you raised financing and, if so, how much?

Chawla: We have raised angel funding of close to a million.

Wolf: What is your founder team background?

Chawla: The core team comes from varied background with a lot of experience in delivering consumer products, to enterprise hardware and software. Industrial Design, Mechanical Engineering, Software Engineering and Supply Chain management.

Wolf: How big is the chai tea market in the US? Globally?

Chawla: Globally the chai market is a big chunk of black tea market and in our estimate about $20B globally. The global tea market is estimated to be $90B. In the US our estimate is that the US chai market is over $1B. However, Chime is first of its kind product and we believe it has the potential to increase the chai market and make chai accessible to folks who don’t drink chai currently.