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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

coffee roasting

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.

Kickstarter: BeanBon Lets You Roast Coffee Beans on Your Countertop

If the first pandemic-spurred lockdown drove us all to bake bread, perhaps quarantine 2.0 will inspire people to roast their own coffee beans. If so, devices like the BeanBon could become all the rage.

Launching on Kickstarter today, the BeanBon is a countertop home coffee roasting appliance system that can roast up to 120 grams of raw coffee beans at a time. Users can choose from three modes:

  • SmartMode: Select from one of eight pre-set profiles to roast coffee with the push of a button. Adjustments can be made in the accompanying app.
  • Creator Mode: Lets users manually control different roasting parameters such as heat, exhaust levels, roast time, etc. Settings can be saved and shared with the BeanBon community.
  • Guru Mode: Allows users to experiment with the roast profiles created by professional coffee roasters.

Any raw coffee bean can be used, and BeanBon offers a curated selection on its site for purchase. There is even a special “BeanBon X Champs” variety that includes a QR code to use special Guru Mode roasting instructions.

The Kickstarter for the BeanBon launched today, and you can pick one up for $699. Company materials say the device will start shipping in September of this year.

The BeanBon is the creation of a Taiwanese company called avigo, and we reached out to them because there were some details left out of their English-language press materials. Namely, they also didn’t include any information about the availability/cost/shipping of coffee beans to the U.S.

The BeanBon device and raw bean market is very similar to the Kelvin home roaster, which costs just $249 for for pre-orders (though the Kelvin doesn’t have a connected mobile app). The Kelvin is supposed to ship to backers next month, that’s almost a two year delay from the original ship date.

That’s good to know if you are interested in the BeanBon. Backing hardware projects on Kickstarter is definitely buyer beware because there are many risks associated with moving a prototype to production.

But given that this pandemic tragically doesn’t show any signs of slowing, there’s a good chance you’ll still be stuck at home (in the U.S.) whenever the BeanBon ships.

Bellwether Coffee Raises $40M Series B to Push Coffee Roasting to the Edge

Bellwether Coffee, which makes electric, ventless internet connected coffee roasting machines, today announced that it has closed a $40 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by DBL Partners and brothers Lyndon and Peter Rive, with additional participation from FusionX, Congruent Ventures, Coffee Bell, Tandem Capital, Spindrift Equities, XN Ventures, Balius Partners and Hardware Club. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Bellwether to $56 million.

As we’ve written before, Bellwether is basically a coffee roaster in a box. Because the machine is electric and ventless, just about any business can install one without needing to go through major physical retrofits to deal with the harmful gasses emitted during traditional coffee roasting. Bellwether’s internet connection means that users can download roast profiles from Bellwether’s cloud and re-create them on-site with precision.

The result of all this makes Bellwether emblematic of a broader trend we are seeing in food tech: pushing food production to the edge. Coffee production at the edge creates new possibilities for coffee sellers, coffee roasters and consumers.

For retailers, having their own roaster means stores like small cafés and supermarkets can create their own custom roast coffees specific to tastes in a particular region, opening up new lines of revenue. For independent roasters, a machine like the Bellwether allows them to expand geographically without having to ship coffee around the country or globe, which is expensive. Instead, smaller roasters can just upload their roast profile instructions to Bellwether’s cloud marketplace and make it available to anyone with a Bellwether. For consumers, on-site roasting means fresher coffee because it is roasted closer to the time of purchase and with less transit.

Nathan Gilliland, CEO of Bellwether, told me by phone yesterday that his company will soon have installed 100 units so far this year, and anticipates installing another 500 units next year. Gilliland said that 40 percent of his customers are independent cafes with one or two locations. Another 40 percent have multiple locations and may already do their own roasting, but use Bellwether to expand geographically. The remainder is a mix that includes a number of grocery stores roasting either their own brand or leveraging profiles from local roasters.

Bellwether generates revenue is a few different ways. It sells the roasting machine for $75,000 or leases it for $1,000 a month. Finally, Bellwether also sells green coffee beans from different farms for $3 – $5 per pound, though you don’t have to purchase them through Bellwether (though Gilliland said that 75 percent of Bellwether customers do).

Customers who do purchase a Bellwether are putting them on display in their stores, according to Gilliland. This theatricality and transparency echoes what we’ve heard elsewhere as food production goes to the edge. One of the reasons supermarkets are looking at Breadbot, which is a mini bread making factory — is that it can engage and delight shoppers.

Bellwether isn’t the only company in the coffee-roasting-on-the-edge space. Roastery, which debuted around the same time as Bellwether, also makes an electric ventless coffee roaster. Though at this point, Roastery has only raised an undisclosed round of seed funding.

Gilliland said Bellwether will use the new funds to scale up operations across sales and manufacturing to meet demand.

*An earlier version of this post stated that Bellwether had already installed 100 units this year, and that there was an additional subscription fee. 

Bellwether Roaster in Firebrand Oakland CA

Bellwether’s Ventless Coffee Roasters Are Headed Across The US

Last April, Bellwether Coffee announced their new ventless coffee roaster designed to help cafes and grocery stores roast in-store without having to install complex ventilation systems. Ten months—and $10m in additional funding—later, roasters are finally showing up around the country.

Bellwether began distributing roasters to cafes in the Bay Area (where the company is located) in the last quarter of 2018. The idea was to start close to home to ensure those customers were having a great experience before expanding further away.

The feedback must have been positive, because the first device to leave the Bay Area ended up in Sump Coffee’s Nashville location late January.

In the coming months, Bellwether will have roasters set up in Austin, Portland, Denver, and New York as well, but with sales reps being hired for eight more cities, it’s only a matter of time before that list becomes much larger.

“From our standpoint, for a company that just announced its product in April, the floodgates feel like they’re opening now.” Nathan Gilliland, Bellwether CEO, told me when I asked what it would take increase demand for Bellwether roasters.

And it makes sense. There are thousands of cafes in the US alone that would love to roast their own coffee in-house, but when they look at the labor overhead, the ventilation required, and the training they need, it feels overwhelming. “That’s really where our pre-orders have come from: those folks who said they’re interested in roasting, but who feel overwhelmed by the usual route”.

Nathan says Bellwether doesn’t really consider itself as a competitor to traditional roaster manufacturers. They not stealing customers away from that kind of coffee roasting equipment. They’re not having people rip out older, chunkier roasters in exchange for Bellwether’s vending-machine-sized device. They’re adding roasting capabilities for the first time in places where it would have never been possible before.

“For all of our customers to date, there is no way that a traditional roaster could have been put in there. They’re in urban locations and multi-story buildings. No way they could get the right permits or do ventilation in those stores.”

Roughly 40% of Bellwether customers are small cafes. Another 40% are multi-location chains—many of them ordering more than one roaster. The goal is to put an end to the ‘hub-and-spoke’ model of roasting, where a single facility supplies beans to a wide area of cafes, by enabling each location to roast its own beans using the same roast profiles stored online. This engages customers of each location with the roasting process, as well as results in better consistency and freshness for each cafe.

The remaining 20% of Bellwether’s orders is a “large national grocery chain”. Nathan’s been teasing us on who this chain is for months now, but we’ll have to wait a little longer.

“We hope to do an announcement with them in a month or two,” he said. “It’s a large chain,” he teased, once again.

One thing Nathan’s thrilled to roll out in the next couple of months is the ‘Tip The Farmer’ feature. Cafe and grocery customers will be able to walk up to the Bellwether roaster and add a tip that goes directly to farmers, rather than just tipping their baristas.

With coffee farmers often receiving under $0.75/lb of coffee (sometimes much, much less), even just one in twenty-five customers tipping $1 can double a farm’s revenue per pound—a dramatic jump. Nathan hopes to have more data on how this feature can impact farmers and customer experiences in the coming months.

Bellwether’s not the only startup working toward ventless roasting technology. Roastery (formerly Carbine Coffee) is also working on a cloud-connected roaster that doesn’t require ventilation, and Nathan believes it’s only a matter of time before the big players in traditional roasting equipment, like Loring and Diedrich, also start working toward more user-friendly, portable gear that can fit in cafes and grocery stores.

This Company Wants to Roast Coffee Beans in Space — For Real

If you think you go to great heights to find the best coffee, you’re about to be one-upped. Space Roasters founders Anders Cavallini and Hatem Alkhafaji decided that in order to achieve perfectly roasted beans, there was only one thing to do: head to outer space.

Naturally.

Here’s how it will supposedly work: According to the Guardian, the spacecraft — dubbed the Coffee Roasting Capsule — will launch from Earth filled with 300 kg green coffee beans, reaching a height of about 200km (124 mi). Upon the 20-minute trip back to Earth, the beans will roast in the heat generated by the reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Since the capsule will be zero-gravity, the beans will be free-floating, meaning that they’ll get a 360-degree even roast.

Photo: Space Roasters website.

Once the device returns to earth, Space Roasters plans to sell the first-ever space-roasted coffee in Dubai, where the company is based (though the website’s contact page lists their location as San Diego, California).

The concept may be ludicrous, but the Space Roasters founders just might have the background to make it happen. Both Cavallini and Alkhafaji have educations in Space Science, and Cavallini has worked at NASA and Orbital and has “over 5 years of experience roasting, brewing, and tasting coffee from around the world.”

But there’s at least one coffee roasting red flag. The Space Roasters team expects temperatures inside the capsule to be around 200°C (392°F) during re-entry. I won’t get too deep into coffee roasting science here, but that’s a pretty low temperature — meaning that the coffee will likely have a very, very light roast. This is just another sign that this stunt is clearly less about creating the perfect cup of joe and more about creating a public spectacle.

Forgive the skepticism. As an ex-specialty coffee barista and forever coffee snob, I’ve seen people go to great heights to achieve the perfect coffee roast. Just not heights as great as this. And honestly, coffee roasted the traditional way is pretty dang great. While theoretically roasting beans in zero gravity would give a more consistent, all-around roast, there’s no way it will taste good enough to justify what is presumably an out-of-this-world pricetag (the company has yet to disclose any pricing details).

In the Guardian interview, the Space Roasters founders said that they were in discussions with private rocket companies like Rocket Lab and Blue Origins to find a launch partner. They’re hoping to launch the capsule as early as next year.

If you’re interested in getting in on this cosmic coffee, the Space Roaster’s website has a countdown clock for a pre-sale campaign which will open in a few weeks. Be sure to let us know if you suddenly get alien superpowers after sipping on a space latte.

Bellwether Coffee Brews up $10 Million Series A for its Roasting Tech

Bellwether Coffee, the startup behind the electric and ventless coffee roaster that’s roughly the size of a vending machine, today announced that it has closed a $10 million Series A round of funding led by Congruent Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by Bellwether to $16 million.

We’re pretty excited about Bellwether’s technology because it could drastically change how batch coffee is created and distributed, shortening the supply chain for smaller coffee chains and other outlets looking to get into craft coffee. As we wrote back in April:

Basically, Bellwether provides a complete roasting solution in a box for a coffee shop. With the accompanying iPad, owners can order green beans from different sources, select from pre-set flavor profiles (or customize their own) and simply press a button. Bellwether does the rest to ensure that the roast is correct and consistent every time.

Bellwether machines can be rented for $1,000 month and include $200 worth of green coffee beans sourced through the Bellwether market. I spoke with Bellwether CEO Nathan Gilliland about today’s announcement and he said that the company has more than $6 million in pre-orders right now, with some customers ordering multiple machines. Breaking that down, Gilliland said that 40 percent of their customers are small cafes with one or two locations, 40 percent are cafe chains with fifteen to twenty locations, and 20 percent of orders are coming from a to-be-announced grocery chain.

It’s the grocery chain customer that is particularly interesting because it points to the customization this roasting model can open up. Grocery store chains big and small could create their own line of coffee suited to the tastes of that region. So far Bellwether has focused its sales efforts in the Bay Area and New York, but is getting pre-orders from places like Michigan, Seattle, Austin and Tennessee.

This notion of consistent, customized coffee for localized distribution is poised to become a real trend in the coming year. In addition to Bellwether’s machines, Roastery (formerly Carbine Coffee) debuted its own electric and ventless roasting machine earlier this year and is going into customer trials this fall.

Gilliland said that the new funding will go towards supporting the growth of the company. This includes adding sales and service people for machine installation and maintenance, software engineers and support staff, as well as capital expenditures like ramping up production.

One cool addition to the Bellwether software is a new “Tip the Farmer” feature. Businesses can put the Bellwether iPad at the point of sale where customers can read about which farm their coffee is coming from, and if they like, use their credit card to tip that farmer directly.

“Tips can make a tremendous difference,” said Gillilan. “The average farmer is making three cents a cup. If one out of every twenty people tips a dollar, that can have a huge impact.”

Armed with this new funding, Bellwether looks like it will be making its own impact as well.

Carbine Coffee Comes out of Stealth, Intros Countertop Roastery

Carbine Coffee, a startup that wants to make coffee roasting accessible and easy for businesses, came out of stealth mode to introduce its Countertop Roastery at the Specialty Coffee Expo in Seattle. The company offers would-be coffee creators a cloud-connected electric roaster with a small footprint, an accompanying software platform to create specific flavor profiles, and a marketplace for purchasing green coffee beans.

The company is targeting businesses like cafés, bakeries and grocery stores, providing them with what they say will be an out-of-the-box way to roast their own coffee. The machine costs $15,000 and can be purchased outright or leased over time.

The Roastery unit itself is a sleek, white box the size of a small fridge with an LCD temperature readout. With traditional coffee roasters, you need to install proper ventilation to whisk away certain harmful gasses the roasting process creates. Carbine’s Roastery, however, is ventless and uses a catalytic process to remove any harmful gasses without the need for any additional ventilation.

Once fully up and running, Roastery users will browse Carbine’s online marketplace to select and buy green coffee beans from different sources around the world. The software will let them dial in a pre-set flavor profile for those beans and the machine will automatically roast the beans accordingly. Or customers can create their own flavor profile and Carbine will help them create it. The Roastery can roast 1.5 pounds of coffee at a time.

Because the machine is connected to the cloud, Carbine and its customers can remotely monitor the Roastery’s performance. Should a piece starting burning out, or something goes wrong with the implementation of the roast that will affect the taste, Carbine can take proactive measures to correct it.

Carbine wasn’t the only full-stack, ventless coffee roaster on display at the Expo. Just down the row from Carbine, Bellwether coffee showed off its own ventless, customizeable coffee roasting solution.

Based in San Francisco, Carbine Coffee has ten full-time employees and received an undisclosed seed round of funding. The company is signing letters of intent with potential customers and looking to go into trials this fall.