BY KATHERINE MAYHEW
The coffee industry is about to get buzzed.
A Seattle-based startup company called CF Global has discovered a way to make flour from coffee cherry pulp, which is not only naturally gluten-free, but is also a sustainable solution to the environmentally hazardous process of harvesting coffee beans.
Before this, coffee farmers typically discarded the remains of the coffee cherry after harvesting its beans for our morning joe, having no use for the pulpy leftovers.
“Getting rid of the pulp is to push it into rivers, and it [creates] a negative impact [on] the environment,” CF Global CEO and inventor Dan Belliveau explains.
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Coffee flour was Belliveau’s innovative, delicious, and environmentally friendly solution. Drying out the pulp and then processing it makes a profitable product that is beneficial for the environment and the coffee growers.
The company is committed to supporting small-scale coffee farmers, who still make up 75 percent of the coffee market worldwide.
The “new global impact food” is naturally gluten-free and does not contain enough caffeine to have a noticeable affect (you’d have to eat seven to 16 slices of coffee flour bread in order to consume the amount of caffeine found in one cup of coffee). The product will not be on the market until 2015.
“We believe it’s going to change the world of coffee forever,” said Belliveau. We’ll have to wait until next year to find out, but we’ve got a hunch he’s right.
Katherine Mayhew is a junior at Princeton University, where she is majoring in English Literature and minoring in Spanish Language and Culture. She is also a member of the women’s varsity crew team and an intern at the university’s women’s center. Even though now she’s indefinitely based on the East Coast, her Pacific Northwest roots are strong–she loves hiking, coffee, good books and rainy days (not necessarily in that order).