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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

coffee

Bellwether Debuts Small-Format, Countertop Electric Coffee Roaster for $15 Thousand

Today Bellwether Coffee announced its latest electric, ventless coffee roasting machine, The Bellwether Shop Roaster. The new roaster, which is the company’s third-generation electric roasting machine, will retail starting at $14,900, about one-quarter of the price of its second-generation roasting appliance.

According to the company, the Shop Roaster will be able to roast 3.3 pounds of coffee in about 15-20 minutes, meaning a throughput of up to 13 pounds of coffee per hour. As part of its new product lineup Bellwether will also offer a continuous roasting upgrade to the Shop Roaster for $5,000 extra ($19,900 for upgrade and the Shop Roaster). The continuous roasting upgrade will enable the auto-loading of green, unroasted beans into the coffee roaster, enabling up to 13 continuous roasts or 44 pounds of coffee before refilling the base with unroasted coffee beans.

We’ve been following Bellwether since the early days here at the Spoon when they were one of the early roasting infrastructure players pushing the industry towards electrification and decentralized roasting. While some of the bigger players in roasting, like Probat, have started to offer electric roasters, Whiel some players like Carbine have gone out of business, Bellwether continues to push the envelope on size and could attract even more coffee shops and retailers to experiment with roasting their own beans.

The Kara Pod is a Coffee Machine That Refills Itself by Pulling Water from Thin Air

This year at CES, Kara Water debuted the Kara Pod, a combo coffee brewer and air-to-water countertop machine. The Kara Pod takes company core technology, which turns humidity from the air into drinking water, and combines it with a coffee machine that can produce up to almost a gallon of water (3.2 liters) per day, which can be used as drinking water or for brewing coffee.

Kara Water was founded in 2017 by Cody Sooden and Michael Di Giovanna. The two wanted to create a machine that could produce clean drinking water free of contaminants. Sooden’s interest in the technology started after he began experimenting with capturing water from air while studying architecture. He eventually wrote a research paper on harvesting moisture from the air, which ultimately became the genesis of the company’s technology.

Kara Water isn’t the first company to show off water-from-air technology at CES. We’ve seen Watergen debut a working model in 2020, and Zero Mass Water, which uses solar power to capture moisture and turn it into drinking water, showed off its machine at CES 2019. But this is the first countertop appliance model we’ve seen and the first time we’ve seen air-to-water combined with a coffee machine.

According to Sooden, the Kara Pod will start shipping in March for $299. You can watch our interview with Sooden below.

The Kara Pod Coffee Maker Gets Water Refilled From Out of Thin Air

Ansā’s RF-Powered Countertop Coffee Roaster Attracts $9M in Fresh Funding

Ansā, a Tel Aviv-based builder of micro coffee roasters, has raised $9 million in funding to help the company roll out its technology into the US market, according to a release sent to The Spoon.

Unlike traditional coffee roasters, which use gas to heat the roaster chambers. The Ansā e23 micro roaster uses radio waves to heat the beans. Much like a microwave oven or newer solid-state cooking systems, this form of heating, known as dialectic heating, heats the coffee bean from core to shell.

According to the company, the system’s computer vision (provided via a built-in camera) coordinates roasting with precision application of the radio waves to transmit the energy to individual beans, creating a highly precise and homogeneously applied roast.

As automation and newer, cleaner technology enables more food processing to move closer to the point of consumption, coffee figures to be one of the leading categories in coming years. We’ve seen the success of electric-powered in-store roasters like other upstarts like Bellwether and some attempts at countertop home coffee roasters (mostly with success), but Ansā is the first to use electromagnetic heating for coffee roasting in office environments.

According to the company, they have secured commercial contracts in the US in cities such as Seattle, New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta and plan to use the funding to fund their rollout in the US.

Spinn Coffee is Burning Through Cash, But Says It Will Reach Profitability as It Raises More Money

Spinn, the maker of a grind and brew coffee machine that uses centrifugal force to extract brewed coffee, is currently raising money via Wefunder to fund ongoing operations.

The company, which we followed closely in the past to determine when and if they’d finally ship their product, looks like it’s shipping lots of machines nowadays, albeit at a fairly significant loss per unit. And now, with the company’s disclosures via WeFunder, we have a pretty good idea of the company’s current sales volume and its overall financial picture.

Here is some of what we learned:

Sales

The company sells a decent number of coffee machines. According to their disclosure, they had revenue of $9.375 million in the calendar year 2022, which translates – at an assumed $800 per machine – about 11,718 or so coffee machines sold last year. The number is probably slightly lower since the company also makes revenue selling coffee to its customers.

The company’s sales were a significant leap over its 2021 number when it had annual revenue of $4.1 million, and it forecasts $13 to $17 million in sales in 2023.

Expenses

The bad news for Spinn is it is still losing a lot of money. According to the disclosure, Spinn had a net loss of $8.95 million in 2022, compared to a loss of $12.3 million in 2021. The company says it had a 22% gross margin in 2022, which is the total left over after the cost of the machines and related services. Where it’s going deep into the red is with the operating expenses, which led to a negative 95% net margin (derived by dividing the profit or, in this case, loss by revenue). In short, in 2022, their total cost of doing business was almost twice as much as their annual revenue. In other words, the company would have needed to make over $18 million in revenue on the same overall expenses to break even.

According to the company, as of May of this year, their burn rate is currently $657 thousand per month, which translates to about $7.9 million annually.

Financing

With that kind of burn rate, the company needs to keep lots of cash on the books, something it has managed to do for the last couple of years via a mix of venture funding and debt.

In 2021 the company raised two venture rounds: $24 million (May 2021) and $12.5 million (October 2021). Last year, the company secured $10.5 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank and Triplepoint Capital. They also secured an additional $2.85 million in SAFE financing, a form of convertible note that is later converted to equity.

But while the company has managed to raise a lot of money, it looks like the till is starting to get a little low. The company had about $1.3 million cash on hand as of May 2023, or roughly two months of money to fund its current burn rate. This short runway makes the company’s recent efforts to raise via WeFunder critical, and the good news is they have raised about $3.55 million via small equity investments via the platform as of today.

The company says they are also currently raising another venture round of $15 million, of which they claim that they have $6-$7 million “soft-circled,” which means they have that much in soft commitments from potential investors but have yet to nail down final terms or issue a term sheet.

Other Interesting Data Points:

  • 11M+ servings made & 65,000 active users – I assume the 65 thousand users are total user profiles and not machines sold, but still, that’s a decent number.
  • Ninety thousand bags of coffee sold & 120+ local roasting partners – at about $20 a bag, that’s about $1.8 million (cumulative) in coffee sales.

So Will They Make It?

That’s the big question. The company has some decent sales momentum, but ongoing sales demand depends heavily on continued spending on marketing and selling machines at or below their current price points of $800 – $999 per machine.

To reach profitability, the company will need significantly higher sales volumes so its accumulated gross margin can overtake its somewhat more fixed operating expenses. Spinn’s management thinks they can do it in 17 or so months, but to get there, they’ll need to raise enough new financing to fund their ongoing burn rate in the meantime.

Another complication is they also have to pay back their lenders in 2024. Unlike equity funding, the company’s debt requires that it be paid back by the maturity dates, which are March and August of next year. If they can’t pay it back and fail to renegotiate new terms with the lenders, the banks can seize the company’s assets.

The bottom line is it looks like the company is currently in a race against the clock to ramp up sales, which means its survival will depend almost entirely on how they do this holiday season when the company does the bulk of its business.

As a Spinn owner, I hope they can make it. I paid for my Spinn way back in 2016 (it was finally delivered in 2020) because back then, I felt plastic-based pod machines were pretty horrible for the planet, and grind and brew was the future of single-serve home coffee. I still think that, and while Spinn has a lot more competition nowadays than it did back then, I still think if it can scale its manufacturing and get over the financial hump, it could be an interesting company to follow well into the future.

Ansā’s New Roaster Uses Radio Waves To Roast Coffee on The Countertop

While we know fresh-roasted coffee tastes better, by the time store-bought beans make it into our coffee machines, chances are they were roasted months ago. But what if we could roast the beans right before they enter the brewer?

If a new company called Ansā has its way, coffee roasting will come to our office breakroom with its new e23 microroaster. The e23 takes green beans sent from the company and roasts them on the countertop without any smoke or ambient heat associated with traditional gas-fired roasting systems.

So how does the company’s roaster work? According to Ansā, the company uses dielectric heating, which usually refers to microwave heating-based systems. According to the company, the system’s computer vision (provided via a built-in camera) coordinates roasting with precision application of the radio waves to transmit the energy to individual beans, creating a highly precise and homogeneously applied roast.

When asked if the system uses an older magnetron-based heating (the heating system for the traditional microwave oven) or newer solid-state heating systems, Ansā wouldn’t specify, instead telling The Spoon, “We’ve designed a purpose-built EM system that allows us to digitally control the intensity and location of the energy concentration within the roasting chamber, in real-time.” My guess is since the system can direct energy with high precision, the system uses a solid-state amplifier to transmit the energy via radio waves.

The company also wouldn’t disclose pricing, saying, “Price is set by the distributors, and at their discretion.” I would estimate the machine would cost anywhere from $5 to $10 thousand, but will be offered at a much lower initial price, subsidized via a built-in coffee supply contract in which Ansā supplies the unroasted green beans for a fixed term.

The e23 is the first we’ve seen using RF radiation to roast the beans on the market. Coffee is traditionally roasted in big drums over gas-powered flames, an energy-intensive roasting process that produces lots of CO2, while newer electric small-footprint roasters like the Bellwether uses convection and conduction heating. According to sources I spoke to this week at the International Microwave Power Institute’s annual conference, microwave-powered coffee roasting is a topic the coffee industry is intrigued by, but it has yet to be commercialized (at least until this week).

According to Ansā, the company is working with a network of distributors across the US focused on the office/workplace segment. These Office Coffee Service (OCS) companies will sell the solution as a bundled service of ansā’s specialty green coffee beans and the e23 micro roaster.

Bellwether Launches Cloud-Powered Small Batch Coffee Roasting-on-Demand

Bellwether, a maker of electric ventless coffee roasters for small-batch roasters and coffee shops, has launched a cloud-connected roasting service that enables coffee shops and retailers to roast coffee via a sharing economy model.

The new service – called Bellwether on Demand – allows anyone interested in roasting a batch of coffee to do so via its newly launched Bellwether Hubs. The Bellwether Hubs, the first of which is located at Bellwether’s headquarters in Berkeley, California, are software-controlled multi-roaster systems that enable anyone to roast a small-batch of coffee at scale.

From the release: “Each roaster in the Hub is controlled by a single interface that allows for flexibility to roast multiple SKUs at once, or fulfill large orders across multiple roasters simultaneously. The system’s software-powered precision can reproduce identical roasts on any roaster, giving retailers the ability to roast large volume orders with the freshness, quality and consistency of a small batch operation.”

This new offering from Bellwether is a natural evolution of the company’s small ventless roaster business that, as I wrote in 2019, moves “coffee roasting from the roastery into the coffee shop with their tech-powered coffee roasters.”

This new business takes the idea even further, adding a sharing-economy wrinkle to a platform already focused on democratizing coffee roasting beyond the big guys. In other words, the company is offering an easier on-ramp to wannabe roasters by offering coffee-roasting-as-a-service to smaller roasters who don’t have the resources to buy their own roaster or those who want to add their own custom-roasted coffee as a business but don’t see the need to invest in their own micro-roaster.

For now, the roasting service is only available through the company’s HQ-hosted Bellwether Hub, but Bellwether says it will soon be rolling out new hubs at customer locations across the country. For Bellwether customers with their own roaster, this offers them a new avenue to monetize their investment in a Bellwether through launching their own roast-on-demand services.

One such Bellwether customer is Daniel Levy, owner of Latitude Coffee.

“The additional revenue that comes from the Bellwether Network is very important to our business because it covers a lot of overhead expenses,” Levy said. “It covers the days that are a little bit slower. It covers the roaster, and it even covers the green beans we buy for ourselves. It’s a consistent revenue stream, and it also helps us be part of the larger Bellwether Community, so there is kind of a belonging to it.”

To use the Bellwether On-Demand service, roasters visit the website, and select their preferred coffee and roast level from the Bellwether Marketplace. From there, orders go directly to the nearest Bellwether Roaster Hub. Roasters can create and save custom profiles.

The Spoon Weekly: Coffee Balls, Insect-Powered Upcycling & More

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Does CoffeeB’s Podless Coffee Machine Have a Fighting Chance Against The Keurig?

Swiss retail giant Migros dropped a giant surprise on the coffee world with the debut of the CoffeeB coffee brewing system.

The new machine, which took the company five years to develop, is a single-serve coffee machine that completely does away with the plastic pod. The new system utilizes round balls of coffee called, um, Coffee Balls, instead of old-school plastic or aluminum capsules. Coffee Balls, which are wrapped in a layer of algae that keeps the coffee fresh and protected from flavor loss, can be dropped into a compost bin after they are used.

I always appreciate a complete rethink of a system to correct a shortcoming, and pod system plastic and aluminum waste are definitely problematic. But even if the CoffeeB system makes great coffee and reduces waste, does it stand a fighting chance to displace a significant number of Keurigs or Nespressos?

It will be an uphill battle. A quarter of Americans use single-serve coffee machines daily (and 4 in 10 households have a Keurig or Nespresso type capsule system), and while newer approaches like grind-and-brew coffee machines that do away with the pod have been around for a few years, none have really seemed to take off in any significant way.

If CoffeeB is to become the first new single-serve system in decades to garner any substantial market share, they’ll need to take a page out of Nespresso and Keurig’s playbook. This means creating a “Coffee Ball” ecosystem around their technology, which would include a scalable and licensable system to produce the coffee servings (aka balls), a strong coffee roaster partner program in which roasters produce branded Balls, and getting retailers on board to sell the system.

Read the full story here. 

You can hear CoffeeB CEO Frank Wilde talk about the future of single-serve coffee at SKS. Use Code NEWSLETTER for 20% off tickets.  

SKS 2022 is in two weeks. We have interactive workshops on building food tech products, fireside chats from leaders building the future of food & cooking, and a product exhibition in the metaverse. You won’t want to miss it. Get your tickets today!

Asia Pacific Leads in Plant-Based Meat IP According to Report

While many think innovation in plant-based meat is a fairly recent phenomenon, companies, researchers and entrepreneurs have looking for ways to leverage plants as an alternative to animal agriculture since the sixties.

However, there’s no doubt the pace of innovation has accelerated in recent decades amidst a worsening climate crisis and a rising global population, and one way to quantify the innovation is through an analysis of the growth in intellectual property. And now, thanks to a new report published by researcher Roots Analysis, we can do just that.

According to the Roots report, the number of cumulative IP publications for plant-based meat has grown by nearly 3x over the past decade, going from 2,388 in 2012 to 7,126 by 2022. In addition, the growth in patent filings, granted patents, and amended patents (the three of which make up the bulk of IP-related publications) has grown nearly every year over the past decade, with the annual growth of publications going from just over one hundred per year for the decade prior to 2012, to around 900 per year in both 2020 (915 new IP documents) and 2021 (891 new documents).

According to the report, most IP documents in the plant-based meat space are patent applications (77.4%) and granted patents (18.7%). When breaking the documents down by region, Asia Pacific is responsible for over half of all IP (3,717), compared to about 18% for North America (1,277 documents) and Europe (1,310 documents).

Read the full story here.

Food Retail

With Connected Stores, Instacart Continues Push to Become Technology Platform Partner for Grocers

Today Instacart announced a new bundle of technologies aimed at helping retailers digitally power their storefronts. A mix of existing and new products, the new suite is a sign of Instacart’s continued effort to transform itself from an in-store shopper and delivery services company to an omnichannel grocery technology arms dealer.

The Connected Store suite of technologies includes the following:

A new and improved Caper cart: The new suite includes a third generation Caper cart. Like the second generation Caper, the new cart allows customers to drop their items in the cart and the Caper adds it to the list without a barcode scan, but is 65% larger, has a longer-life battery, and is designed to work well in inclement weather.

Scan & Pay: For retailers who choose not to deploy Caper carts, Instacart is introducing a new service called Scan & Pay. Scan & Pay allows shoppers to scan and pay for products with their phone. The service looks especially helpful for EBT Snap users, who can scan items to identify whether they are EBT SNAP-eligible.

Lists: Lists syncs up a shopper’s personal shopping list with the Caper cart app or a grocer Instacart-powered app. Items are imported into the Caper list and checked off when you drop them in your cart.

You can read the full story here. 

Food Retail

Fresh Portal Is a Tech-Powered Take on the Old-Timey Milk Door

When I first saw the Fresh Portal at CES, I thought it made a whole lotta sense. After all, what food-ordering families wouldn’t appreciate the ability to keep groceries or restaurant-delivered food cold or warm until they arrive home from work?

But the idea behind the Fresh Portal isn’t exactly new. In fact, you can go back as far as the early 1900s to find a predecessor in the milk door. Milk doors were built into homes when the milkman was as common as the mailman, an early version of a storage locker where that weekly delivery of milk could be stored until ready for pickup. Like the Fresh Portal, the milk door was actually two doors, one on both the outside and inside with the storage cavity in between.

Fresh Portal founder Jeremy High is aware of the history of home delivery storage lockers. In a recent interview with The Spoon, he said his product is a modern, high-tech take on the old-timey milk locker.

“Fresh Portal is a modern twist on that,” High said. “It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It receives deliveries of the food you’re getting delivered by DoorDash or Instacart, groceries, and even packages.”

To read the full story here.

You can meet Fresh Portal CEO Jeremy High at SKS in two weeks. Get your 20% off ticket with discount code NEWSLETTER today!

Future Food

Vienna’s LIVIN Farms Receives €6 million to Upcycle Food Waste Into Insect-Powered Protein

Turning food waste into a usable commodity might seem like magic, but it’s a reality for companies such as Vienna-based LIVIN farms. The company has announced a €6 million Series A round led by venture Investor Peter Luerssen, allowing it to expand its team and solution.

As a player in the alternative protein space, LIVIN Farms developed HIVE PRO, a modular system for fully automated insect processing. HIVE PRO allows waste management companies and large-scale food producers to upcycle organic waste and by-products into valuable proteins, fats, and fertilizers.

In an interview with The Spoon, Katharina Unger, Founder of LIVIN Farms, explained her company’s process. “Livin Farms customers are largely food and feed processing companies and agricultural players that have access to at least several thousand tons of organic by-products every year. They typically make a loss on it by having disposal costs. Generally used feed substrates include by-products, surplus production from the bakery, potato, vegetable, and fruit processing industry, and pre-consumer wastes from retail and grain by-products.”

One of the critical elements of the LIVIN Farms solution is the use of black soldier fly larvae in its “plug-and-play” solution. A module is set up at a customer site, after which, as Unger says, her company operates it as a Farming as a Service (FaaS) model. The first step is when the organic waste of the customer is recycled on-site by being processed and prepared as feed for the insects. After that is completed, using a robotic handling machine moves the feed made from the organic food waste into pallet-sized trays. The machine then inserts seedlings (baby larvae) and empties the harvest-ready larvae from the trays.

You can read the full story here.

Food Robots

UAE Installs Bread-Dispensing Robots Around Dubai To Help Feed Those in Need

LBX Food Robotics (formerly known as LeBread Xpress) announced today they have partnered with The Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives (MBRGI) Foundation to install bread-dispensing robots throughout Dubai to help feed those in food insecure situations. The custom-built Bake Xpress machines will provide a selection of complimentary local breads and pitas and will give customers the ability to make voluntary monetary donations.

The partnership started in 2020 when MBRGI, the charitable foundation of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (the ruler of Dubai), approached LBX to see if their robotic bread-making robots could be used as a way to get food to people in need. Two years later, the partners have deployed a total of 10 bread-dispensing robots around Dubai as part of the first phase of the collaboration. More robots are planned for the first quarter of 2023.

To read the full story here!

Does CoffeeB’s Podless Coffee Machine Have a Fighting Chance Against The Keurig?

Last week, Swiss retail giant Migros dropped a giant surprise on the coffee world with the debut of the CoffeeB coffee brewing system.

The new machine, which took the company five years to develop, is a single-serve coffee machine that completely does away with the plastic pod. The new system utilizes round balls of coffee called, um, Coffee Balls, instead of old-school plastic or aluminum capsules. Coffee Balls, which are wrapped in a layer of algae that keeps the coffee fresh and protected from flavor loss, can be dropped into a compost bin after they are used.


I always appreciate a complete rethink of a system to correct a shortcoming, and pod system plastic and aluminum waste are definitely problematic. But even if the CoffeeB system makes great coffee and reduces waste, does it stand a fighting chance to displace a significant number of Keurigs or Nespressos?

It will be an uphill battle. A quarter of Americans use single-serve coffee machines daily (and 4 in 10 households have a Keurig or Nespresso type capsule system), and while newer approaches like grind-and-brew coffee machines that do away with the pod have been around for a few years, none have really seemed to take off in any significant way.

If CoffeeB is to become the first new single-serve system in decades to garner any substantial market share, they’ll need to take a page out of Nespresso and Keurig’s playbook. This means creating a “Coffee Ball” ecosystem around their technology, which would include a scalable and licensable system to produce the coffee servings (aka balls), a strong coffee roaster partner program in which roasters produce branded Balls, and getting retailers on board to sell the system.

The good news for CoffeeB is Migros’ in-house brand in Café Royal is already one of the more popular single-serve coffee brands in Switzerland, and the brand’s parent company Delica is one of Switzerland’s largest coffee roasters. Add in the fact Migros is one of Europe’s largest retailers, and you might just have a powerful enough vertically integrated company to give CoffeeB a fighting chance.

Ultimately the biggest challenge for CoffeeB will be convincing consumers to change their behavior. While consumers often have good intentions when asked about their desire to be greener, in reality getting them to change behavior and switch to a new system – often at a higher cost – is very difficult. But if Migros can get its price-per-serving down and convince consumers Coffee Balls are better than all those wasteful pods, the CoffeeB might just breathe some well needed fresh air into the single-serve segment.

Ground Control’s Cyclops Puts Pour-Over Economics on Notice

While waiting in line at Starbucks for your double Grande macchiato with extra foam, few people put their phones down long enough to contemplate the economics behind each coffee drink. Even those queued up for five-to-ten minutes anticipating a rich cup of pour-over caffeine have no idea the cost of each beverage in terms of labor and equipment.

Oakland, Calif-based Ground Control has developed what it believes not only solves the labor issue associated with pour-over coffee—generally regarded as a premium process that provides an excellent cup—but does so without sacrificing taste. Eli Salomon, Ground Control’s Founder and CEO, sums it up succinctly, “The quality is second to none, while the business value is very meaningful.”

“We’re talking about an industry that has very little innovation when it comes to large-scale brewing,” Salomon told The Spoon in a recent interview. “And so, our inspiration was really to create a machine that filled all the gaps left by a lack of new ideas. It’s sorely needed by cafes, especially, you know, as we see lots of small cafes struggling during this current economic climate.”

The economics of offering pour-over coffee is difficult to sustain in the long run, Salomon noted. “Our customers are able to reduce their labor costs three to five hours a day; in addition, instead the baristas are interacting with your customers and are selling more coffee and giving them a better customer experience. It’s really a game changer for their business model.”

The machine in question is called “Cyclops.” It is a customizable, programmable batch brewer, which means it can make a large amount of coffee using a multiple filtration process—or, in industry parlance. Tranches. Ground beans are put through multiple cycles, each one bringing out another element of the beans from sweetness to body. The resulting brew offers cafes, convenience stores, and other customers a superior product on par with pour-over with far less labor.

The current Cyclops, in many ways, hasn’t changed from the model set up in Eli Salomon’s kitchen in 2013. “Until today, the process is almost identical,” he said. “We launched our first production-grade, Ground Control, in 2017, and then we launched our current model, the Cyclops, in 2018.”

Salomon, who sports an MBA from Wharton and a law degree from Harvard, says he wasn’t always a great student; coffee pushed him academically and began his love for the noble bean.

“I was a freshman in high school and a terrible student,” he recalls. “My dad instituted a new policy. He said, ‘Look, whenever you want to do your homework, I’ll take you to Starbucks, and you can do your homework there. And that was my first exposure to coffee really in a Starbucks. And so, I became a great student and was also very caffeinated.”

The Ground Control CEO began a coffee roastery business while studying for the bar exam. “My friends and I started a website that sold espresso on the web,” Salomon said. “We had the largest selection of espresso beans at the time and over 50 different origins.”

Ground Control has sold over 500 of its Cyclops coffee machines, each for $10,900. It has installs worldwide, including in Saudi Arabia, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Is a home version in the works? “Our goal is to replace every brewer in the world,” Salomon said. “

Fellow, Maker of Specialty Coffee Gear, Raises $30 Million Series B

Fellow, a maker of specialty coffee gear, announced today they had raised $30 million via a Series B funding round led by Nextworld Evergreen.

The San Francisco-based company, which has made a name for itself with its somewhat pricey design-forward coffee-making gear, was started by founder and CEO Jake Miller in his dorm room at Stanford where he began work on a coffee steeper that raised close to $200 thousand on Kickstarter.

Since those early days, Miller and his team have launched a family of coffee and tea gear, ranging from French presses to kettles to insulated coffee mugs. The company, which has gained a following among baristas and celebrities for its sleekly designed Stagg EKG kettles (and also influenced a dozen or more knockoffs), also sells coffee beans via its website and has opened a flagship retail store in San Francisco.

Fellow CEO Jake Miller

I first connected with Miller in 2017 when he showed off the Stagg Kettle and pitched his company at the Smart Kitchen Summit. I sat down with him yesterday to talk about his company and plans moving forward.

The home coffee gear market has a rough space for some startups, yet Fellow has been able to grow. Why do you think you’ve had success while others have struggled or gone out of business?

I do think a big part of our success was our “failure” to raise venture capital back in 2013. With limited cash, we had to be incredibly thoughtful about our product roadmap. Not only did we have to understand the appeal and market size of our products, but we had to be very honest with ourselves about the likelihood of us actually delivering a product that customers would love.

For example, although a tiny market, we had high confidence in our ability to launch the best pour-over kettle in the world with a small team and limited resources. In 2013, if someone would have handed us $5 million I think there is a good chance we would have bit off too much and wouldn’t have been able to deliver. It’s exciting to sit here today with the experience of the past 9 years and now the confidence/ability to deliver on the big stuff moving forward. 

What do you plan on using the funding for?

With the capital from the fund raise, we are going to build the team out further so we can run even faster in product development, coffee, and major distribution expansion, including international and our Fellow-owned retail stores. Our second store in Venice, CA opens in August.

The consumer hardware space has changed pretty dramatically since you launched almost 10 years ago, and crowdfunding is one of the aspects that has gotten harder (due to lots of high-profile failures). Would you crowdfund today if you were starting a company or take a different path?

I’m incredibly thankful to the thousands of backers who have supported Fellow through multiple products. The connections we’ve made with our early supporters is priceless. So yes, I think if done right, with the right intentions and expectations, I would absolutely use crowdfunding for a new company today. And, who knows, maybe Fellow goes back to crowdfunding for one of our future products! Even though we don’t need the cash for development today, the insights and feedback we get from our backers is essential to our success.

When you started designing your first product while still at Stanford, did you think you’d be building a consumer products brand long-term?

From day one, my goal was to launch a brand that had real permanence. I often talk internally about my dream of building a 100-year company. So, the desire was there. However, when I think back to 2013 at Stanford sitting in the Launchpad class at the d.School, my big dream was to have 10 employees who were passionate about product design. Now, all of the Kardashians have a Fellow Stagg EKG and it’s also being used by world champion brewers. Fellow today is far more than I ever imagined, but what is exciting is that I truly believe we are just getting started. 

Do you see Fellow expanding beyond coffee/tea hardware in the future?

At some point, yes. But, not today. There is still so much more our customers are asking us to do within coffee. However, at some point in time our customers will ask us to move into other categories in the kitchen. We build beautifully functional tools for the home barista today, and we’re excited to build beautifully functional tools for other passions in the kitchen in the future.

You were a Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase finalist in 2017.  Do you have any memories from that experience you can share?

Yes! I remember pitching on stage alongside so many other great entrepreneurs. That was a real treat for me. Additionally, I remember seeing the other brands and products at the event and feeling inspired. Talking to other founders at SKS helped me to internalize the value that technology can create in the kitchen. 

Canadian Sisters Launch Capra Press, a French Press That Doesn’t Oversteep and Eliminates Messy Cleanup

Mia and Zoey Knobler had a love-hate relationship with the French press. The two sisters from British Columbia loved the richer flavored coffee that resulted from the steep and plunge appliance, but hated the messy clean-up and the over-brewed coffee resulting from continued exposure to the grounds.

So they set to making a French press that had all the upside of that full-bodied first pour but not the downside of over-brewed coffee and sludgy cleanup. The result was the Capra Press, which debuted this week on Indiegogo and has raised over $32 thousand as of this writing.

The sisters teamed up with product designer Jeff Polster to create a French press with two interesting differentiators. The first is a mesh filter that seals after pressing, preventing bitter coffee from over-extraction. The filter utilizes silicon umbrella valves that seal the grounds into the bottom after plunging.

The second feature is a removable bottom that enables easier cleanup. Called the “grounds-keeper,” the twist-off bottom allows the user to dispose of the grounds into the trash or compost.

Capra Press Founders (L to R): Jeff Polster, Zoey Knobler, Mia Knobler

The team worked out of the Revelstoke Idea Factory, a community maker space and design lab in Revelstoke, British Columbia set up by the City of Revelstoke and the Revelstoke Fabrication Lab Society. After two years of prototyping and testing their ideas, the trio launched the Capra Press on Indiegogo this week.

Longtime readers of The Spoon might recall another French press project called the Rite Press that raised $1.3 million on Kickstarter but never delivered the product. When I asked Mia Knobler about the inevitable comparisons some might make to the ill-fated Rite Press, she pointed out that the Rite Press was offered at an artificially low price ($40) that didn’t consider the true cost of manufacturing. The Capra Press Indiegogo pricing starts at $85 for ‘Super Early Birds’ and has a retail price of $125.

“We are very far along in the process with the Capra Press and have been conservative with all our estimates to ensure that we can fulfill all the orders from our customers without compromising on quality or innovation,” said Knobler.

While all hardware crowdfunding campaigns carry some level of risk, the Capra Press is off to a good start, with over $32 thousand raised in just two days from nearly 300 backers. With 34 days left, the campaign has a long runway to raise more funding.

Voyage Foods is Creating the Future of Coffee, Peanut Butter, and Chocolate

I don’t want to live a world where coffee and chocolate don’t exist. First off, I love all of these things dearly. Secondly, I imagine if the supply of these precious items runs out, this will lead to utter chaos amongst self-proclaimed coffee and chocolate “addicts.” Unfortunately, climate change threatens the ability to continue to produce these crops to the extent that they are produced today. However, a company called Voyage Foods wants to “future-proof” these foods by creating sustainable alternatives that taste exactly like coffee and chocolate and peanut butter.

To understand how exactly Voyage Foods is doing this, I spoke with the CEO and founder of the company, Adam Maxwell. Founded about a year ago, Voyage Foods focuses on foods that pose environmental, ethical or health issues. Maxwell explained that there are already many companies making vegan products in response to a demand for sustainable products, and said “There is a tunnel vision kind of focus on really where we should put effort in the food system.” So many other parts of the food system are being ignored, and this is why Voyage Foods landed on coffee, cacao, and peanut butter.

The massive global demand for coffee and cacao has led to some negative consequences like illegal deforestation, child labor, and increased water usage. The land available for growing these crops (which can only be grown in certain regions) is shrinking. “The production of these things is going to go down and down,” Maxell said. “The world’s consumption is projected to go up, so part of it’s how can we archive these things for the future?”

While there aren’t necessarily environmental concerns associated with peanut butter, it has other problems; approximately 1 percent of the population in the U.S., or about 3 million people, are allergic to peanuts.

Voyage Foods sent The Spoon a sample of its bean-free coffee and cacao-free milk chocolate bar. I first took a swig of the coffee, and it tasted like a smooth cold brew coffee. It also had unique tasting notes that I had never tasted in coffee, leaving a slight smokey mesquite flavor in the back of my throat (for me, this was a good thing). I appreciated that the coffee had no acidity and thoroughly enjoyed it poured over ice with a splash of oat milk. Maxwell could not disclose what ingredients were in the alternative coffee but did say it still contained caffeine.

The milk chocolate bar was fully vegan and made from a base of grape seeds, shea butter, sunflower meal, and a few other ingredients. It certainly tasted like chocolate and reminded me of the milk candy bars I would eat as a child, like a Hershey’s bar. I am someone who typically only eats dark chocolate, but was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, and was sad when it was all gone.

When asked about how Voyage Foods makes all of its products, Maxwell responded with “A lot of our process and our technology is, how do we manipulate different feedstocks into the same outputs? How do you roast something that is not a cocoa bean, to make it taste like cocoa?”. Voyage Foods starts with whole food ingredients, like sunflower meal or grape seeds, and manipulates them in a certain way to achieve flavors found in the products they are trying to mimic. Maxwell also said the company’s facilities look similar to existing chocolate, coffee, and peanut butter production facilities.

Although I did not get to try it, Voyage Foods’ peanut butter product is made from various grains and seeds. This product is slated to be the first to launch and available for consumers to purchase in early 2022. The chocolate will likely launch in mid-2022. I would love to get my hands on more of Voyage Foods’ coffee, but we will all, unfortunately, have to likely wait until 2023 for this product.