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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Kelvin

The Kelvin Home Coffee Roaster Enters Production, Ships To Backers in August

Back when the Kelvin, a countertop home coffee roasting appliance, launched on Kickstarter in March of 2018, their promo video made a simple but powerful statement:

“The roast of the bean, the most important factor in our coffee’s flavor, has always been completely out of our control.”

While that’s a bit of an exaggeration – there are plenty of home roasting machines available at the click of a button – the idea of a simple, small countertop appliance was enough to entice me to back the Kelvin. With an estimated ship date of December 2018, I had hopes I’d be roasting my own coffee beans by Christmas.

Two years later, I’m still without my Kelvin. When I’d checked in last August with the CEO of IA Collaborative (the company behind the Kelvin), Dan Kraemer told me via email he expected shipment in November, but another Christmas came and went and still no Kelvin.

But this week, a light at the end of my coffee roasting tunnel appeared in the form of an update that said the Kelvin had entered full production.

From the update:

Now that most parts are made for mass production, the team will begin assembling roasters and loading onto pallets to be shipped in the coming weeks. While our team was testing roasters from pilot production, our manufacturing team was preparing the Kelvin packaging.

Anyone familiar with the hardware crowdfunding knows delays are almost expected nowadays. Still, a year and a half delay is a long one, especially when it seemed much of the research and development of the product appeared completed by the time it showed up on Kickstarter.

I shouldn’t complain too much. Some products never make it to the customer, and other delays can take the better part of a half-decade (I’m looking at you Spinn), so just getting a product you backed on Kickstarter nowadays, no matter how delayed, can feel like a win.

While it might be a couple years later, here’s to hoping I’ll be roasting beans by Christmas.

Meet Kelvin, A Home Coffee Roaster For The Masses

So you think you’re on the coffee cutting edge, do you? Whether cold brewed, nitrogen-infused, poured-over or robot-crafted, if it’s a new craft coffee trend, you’ve tried it.

But have you roasted your own beans? Don’t feel so bad. Most people haven’t.

Now, however, may be your chance. That’s because now the Kelvin, a new app-powered home coffee roaster, just launched today on Kickstarter.

The Kelvin is the brainchild of company called IA Collaborative. IA normally helps big companies like GE Appliances or United Airlines create new products and bring to market, only this time they’ve decided to create their own product in the Kelvin.

I interviewed company founder Dan Kraemer, who told me the product spun out of an internal initiative called IA Ventures. Kraemer created Ventures as a way for employees to pitch products that they believe “should exist in the world” to coworkers four times a year.

The Kelvin was one of the very first products pitched and ever since the company has been working on bringing the product to life. Hundreds of prototypes and a design award later, Kraemer believes the Kelvin will help bring home coffee roasting to the mass market.

That’s a heavy lift, in part because home roasting has not historically been very approachable. Not only do consumers have to find green, unroasted beans somewhere – something your local grocery store or Starbucks do not have on hand – but they also need to buy a home roaster and learn how to roast the beans.

With the Kelvin, Kraemer and company have tried to address all of these pain points. First is the price. They knew they had to make the product affordable, since often times small coffee roasters can cost up to $500 or more. The Kelvin early bird launch price on Kickstarter is $200.

They also are going to offer green coffee beans for consumers to buy directly from through the app, either through single purchase or subscription. And if the consumer wants to source their own green beans? They can do that as well (in other words, no Teforia-like vendor lock in).

And then there’s the roaster itself, which allows the user to roast a small amount of beans, ranging from enough for a single cup to a pot.  The Kelvin is about the size of a home coffee grinder, and includes a dial to adjust for time and has an on-board timer display.

But the Kelvin sets it self apart from other home roasters with its app. According to Kraemer, the user can create different roasting profiles within the app, and can save the ones they like so the roast is fairly automated. Kelvin users can also browse and order green beans within the app.

The company plans to ship the Kelvin to backers by the holidays. While ship times for crowdfunded hardware are notoriously susceptible to slippage (hello Spinn), backers can take comfort that the company has spent a year and a half working and existed long before the Kelvin (though, according to Kraemer, they will be creating a separate, privately held company for the Kelvin).

I’m considering backing the Kelvin myself because, unlike other home roaster products (like the large-footprint, all-in-one Bonaverde), it brings everything together to make things fairly straightforward and low-effort in a small countertop device. As excited as I get for new ways to craft food or drinks at home, I’m actually pretty lazy, so searching for green beans and learning how to roast always seemed like too much work. Because I can buy the beans, roast, and then have clean up done with the Kelvin (it automatically separates the chaff), it’s a good solution for a lazy-man, wannabe roaster like myself.

Check out the Kelvin for yourself and see if you want to take to leap into home roasting.