This is a story about coffee—to be precise: about eating coffee. It is also a story about potentially the largest—and surely the only profitable—regeneration of nature project ever undertaken. It is a story that begins in a small country with two million inhabitants on the Baltic Sea between Lithuania and Estonia.
Few readers would picture groundbreaking coffee innovation to come from Latvia. But it is the home of passionate cyclist, Raivis Vaitekuns. For years, Vaitekuns spent most of his free time cycling through the forests that cover more than half of his county. Then, one day with two cousins he decided to make his favorite activity their business. They opened a bicycle repair shop in Riga that quickly became the meeting point for the biking enthusiasts in Latvia’s capital. As more and more people chose the shop as a starting point for their bike rides, Vaitekuns thought they could add a dimension to their business by serving coffee to the cyclists. An espresso bar was added which only made the place more popular.
The initiative allowed Vaitekuns to explore another hobby of his: enjoying coffee. He had always been an aspiring barista and now he had the perfect business excuse to develop his talents. As his barista expertise and his appreciation of good quality coffee grew, Vaitekuns began to realize there were many places where the coffee was not as good as he liked it to be. He realized that during his travels he was often ordering tea simply because he did not like the quality of the coffee that was served at, for instance, airports.
With his cousins, Gundars and Andrew Vaitekuns, Raivis began thinking about creating a high-quality coffee product that would be suitable for travel. A take-away cold brew coffee drink seemed a solution, but they also realized that such a cold product would not have a great market in a Nordic country like Latvia… Instead, they decided to look into an edible coffee product that would also solve another problem: the enormous amount of waste—coffee grounds—that is produced in the coffee shops.
They started developing a bar made from the whole coffee berry. They recombined the roasted coffee beans with the dried antioxidant-rich husk—the cascara—of the coffee berry. Subsequently, they used a taste- and odor-less cocoa butter to create a pure coffee substance that looks and feels like a chocolate bar but has a strong coffee character. In 2016, they introduced Coffee Pixels in Latvia and began production in a small local factory.
The whole berry Coffee Pixels offer a solution to a big problem in the coffee industry; a problem that contributes to the unhealthy trend of deforestation in the tropics. The cup of coffee you drink contains some 2 grams of the harvested bean. That harvested bean is only 0.2 percent of the harvested biomass. That means that coffee farmers produce 99.8 percent waste to serve you a cup of coffee. The waste does not produce any income for the farmers. We should not be surprised that coffee farmers struggle to make a living and are obsessed with producing more and more to make ends meet while they keep cutting trees along the way.
Four hundred years ago, coffee was a mysterious custom in the Islamic world. It was only commercially cultivated in Ethiopia and in Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula. You could find the world’s first coffeeshop in Constantinople at the Bosporus where Europe and Asia meet.
Today, coffee is one of the most widespread and best understood words in the world, coffeeshops are everywhere, 25 million farmers in 70 countries grow the crop, and the 8 billion inhabitants of planet Earth consume 825 billion cups of coffee every year. Coffee connects the world. It has become an exceptionally valuable commodity—exports are worth over $25 billion a year, and retail sales dozens of times more. The history of coffee illustrates the rise and the success of global capitalism. It is also a painful story of environmental destruction and social inequality.
Coffee trees need water and humidity, and they grow best in the tropical zone between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn at altitudes between 500 and 2,000 meters. The rich ‘tropical’ soil provides coffee its flavor. Coffee trees can be found in any rainforest. They grow under the protection—in the shade—of the canopy made up by giant tropical trees. As coffee’s popularity grew, cultivation took off. Farmers began clearing parts of the rainforest to plant coffee trees. Few consumers may realize that drinking coffee has been connected with massive deforestation from the very beginning.
Coffee farms practice monoculture—over the past century, ever more aggressively squeezing more plants on a piece of land than ever thought viable. Intensive farming exhausts the soil and makes the coffee trees more vulnerable to pests. The farmers respond with chemicals—fertilizers and pesticides—further depleting the soil and provoking a downward spiral. The soil loses the micro-organisms and the fungi that keep it together and make nutrients available to plants. That means that the heavy tropical rains wash down the remaining healthy soil from the mountain slopes causing more and more erosion. Landslides happen often and destroy the income of farmers forever.
The negative trend is escalated by the ‘colonialists of the 21st century’: multinational corporations. Despite the fact that the average size of 80 percent of the 25 million coffee farms in the world measures not even 1.5 hectares, more than a third of the global coffee trade is controlled by a dozen multinationals: Neumann (Germany), Nestlé (Switzerland), Lavazza (Italy), Starbucks (USA) and others. These corporations negotiate the prices that set the world market and force smallholder farms to adhere to a business model that always prioritizes output per hectare at the lowest possible price regardless of environmental or social costs.
As a result, almost half of the coffee farmers live in poverty and hunger. According to a recent Financial Times calculation, a farmer may get 1.5 cents of the $3 that Starbucks charges for a cup of coffee. That is 0.5 percent for the farmer! The profits are made by the intermediaries down the supply chain: the traders, the roasters, and the coffeeshops.
A large 2005 study of ‘food insecurity’ among some 500,000 coffee farmers in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Mexico found that almost two-thirds struggled to meet their most basic food needs. The drama presents the farmers with a painful choice between undesirable outcomes that all involve the loss of resilient livelihoods built up over generations. They may consider shifting to the very profitable production of coca for the—illegal—drug industry. In their despair, they may join revolutionary movements and the fight for radical and violent change. Many choose migration and leave their homelands in search of a better future in another country.
In the past 50 years, the world has seen all of these outcomes in coffee-growing countries. There were 50 million coffee farmers some 50 years ago; today there are 25 million left. The political debate about immigration in the United States—the number one consumer of coffee in the world—is directly linked to a completely failing coffee industry in Central America. In 2019 alone, more than 200,000 people in Guatemala—once the number one coffee producer in the region—felt forced to flee their home country making Guatemalans the single largest source of migration toward the US that year. The daily coffee drinking habits of millions of Americans force the farmers off their lands and knock on the door of the United States—where they are unwelcome!
What about fair trade? Premium-priced fair-trade coffee somewhat softens the hardship for the farmer, but it does not fundamentally change the business model. Fair trade is not a good system; it is less bad. Fair trade producers are still focused on reducing their costs as much as possible while still maintaining the standards they have signed up for. They are basically running the same race with extra handicaps which very much seems to explain why—after decades—fair trade is still a niche concept.
To radically change the lives of the coffee farmers, we need a new business model that is based on using locally available resources as much as possible. Coffee farmers cannot afford to discard 99.8 percent of the biomass they cultivate. They cannot survive if they throw away everything of the berry they harvest except for the pit, the coffee bean. That is why Raivis Vaitekuns’ Coffee Pixels is such a groundbreaking initiative. His innovation gives value to the whole coffee berry.
The story gets even better than Vaitekuns ever imagined when he was envisioning to bring a good coffee experience to travelers. He did not know that coffee is a superfood. In fact, it is the most valuable known superfood on the planet. In the past decade, many health-conscious people—particularly in the western world—have become used to the special benefits of goji berries, chia seeds, turmeric, and much more. There is a scientific rating for the health benefits of these superfoods: The Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC). The ORAC value of a food comes from a lab test that determines the ‘total antioxidant capacity’. Less oxidation in the body means less inflammation means better health.
The popular goji-berries have an ORAC value of 25,300 for 100 grams. Blueberries score 6,552 and another health food favorite, kale, 1,773. They do not come close to the top 10 superfoods that includes cloves with an ORAC value of 314,446 and cinnamon with 267,536. But here is the surprise: The coffee berry has an ORAC value of 343,900. The whole coffee berry provides more antioxidants than any other known superfood.
There is little scientific research about the health benefits of the coffee berry, but the available studies show strong results. The University of Novi Sad in Serbia did a small study with 20 athletes. For four weeks, the athletes took 800 milligrams of a coffee berry extract every day. At the end of the study, their ‘total antioxidant capacity’ (TAC) was “significantly higher” than at the start of the project. Studies with mice done at Meiji University in Japan indicate that coffee berry extract slows the growth of cancer cells and improves immune function.
Extract from the skin of the coffee fruit supports cognitive health too. Researchers of Auburn University in the United States found that taking the extract daily is associated with improvements in reaction times and accuracy. Another study—by Applied BioClinical, a bioclinical research facility in Irvine, California—showed substantially increased levels of the protein abrineurin (brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF) in the brain as a result of treatment with whole coffee fruit concentrate powder. The data of the study show that BDNF levels increased with 143 percent. This is especially significant because people with Alzheimer’s disease tend to have lower levels of BDNF.
The potential for coffee berry extract is massive. All other top superfoods need to be farmed. Instead, the pulp of the coffee berry is a waste product that is already widely available for little additional investment if it were not dumped in rivers or left to rot on the 25 million coffee farms around the world. With an annual coffee harvest of 10 million tons, the current waste supply is 50 million tons. At least half of that can be sold as highly valuable coffee berry extract.
There is a virtually unlimited supply of the highest-ranking superfood. For the first time, there is a super nutritious food that can be made widely available at affordable prices. Coffee farmers will be able to offer healthy nutrition to millions of people around the world. At the same time, their revenue would substantially increase. The potential for change is huge. In 2018, cascara pioneer Aida Battle from El Salvador told Bloomsberg that she was receiving $7 for a pound of the coffee berry skin compared to $1.20 for a pound of the beans—that is almost 6 times as much! Please note that Battle with her own specialty coffee brand, receives a much higher price for coffee than the average farmer who may only get $0.15 for a pound. The cascara factor for that farmer is an amazing 47!
By volume, coffee farmers have more cascara to sell than coffee. A quick calculation: 50 percent cascara volume of the current coffee waste supply of 50 million tons comes to 25 million tons. That volume translates to 50 billion pounds. At the above-mentioned price of $7 a pound, 25 million coffee farmers would generate an additional annual revenue of $350 billion—or $14,000 per farmer per year! The conclusion is simple: Cascara can dramatically transform the lives of farmers while bringing more health to their customers throughout the world.
However, there is more that Raivis Vaitekuns did not foresee when he launched his Coffee Pixels. Cascara offers a groundbreaking business model to maintain and regenerate rainforests. Today, consumers pay a higher price for ‘shade-grown coffee’—coffee cultivated in the rainforest where it originally belongs. However, the higher price for shade-grown coffee is not enough to motivate a massive return of coffee farmers to the rainforests. Their production costs go down. Forest-grown coffee does not require fertilizers and pesticides as the rich ecosystem of the forest balances and protects hundreds of species and does not need human ‘chemical intervention’.
However, these savings in production are not enough to overcome a substantially lower yield.
A coffee farmer gets an average yield of 4,500 kilograms per hectare of his open field farm. When he takes the coffee back into the forest, his annual harvest tumbles to about 750 kilograms per hectare. How could a farmer be interested in such a transition? Despite the higher price for shade-grown coffee, the loss of the income of 4,500 – 750 = 3,750 kilograms appears to be too much for the farmer to change his course.
This is where the value of the ‘waste’ of the coffee berry, the cascara, radically changes the business model of the farmer. The farmer’s yield of ‘only’ 750 kilograms shade-grown rainforest coffee beans per hectare means he also has a harvest of at least 1,500 kilograms of cascara. And for that superfood he gets a much better price (see sidebar) that makes his return to the rainforest very profitable. In fact, growing coffee in the rainforest will make his life much better.
Coffee can drive and inspire the trend towards agroforestry to regenerate rainforests. Agroforestry environments are far more efficient than monoculture farms. According to one study, agroforestry needs just 0.2 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food. The reason is simple: instead of focusing on one product of a monoculture farm, agroforestry offers multiple products and multiple outputs. That kind of efficiency changes the game of food production.
Not only do forest farmers generate a much-deserved higher income, they also produce more food with more nutrients. This is essential as the world faces the challenge of hunger and malnutrition. That is why the FAO advocates agroforestry as a key solution towards a food system that is healthier for people and planet. Agriculture has been an enemy of the environment, according to the UN organization, but there is increasing recognition that regenerative forest farming provides environmental benefits and sustains livelihoods. The FAO also points out that agroforestry increases climate resilience. One study suggests that every hectare of agroforestry can prevent the deforestation of two to eight hectares.
Today, there are about 100 million hectares of agroforestry in the world. This number includes 6 million hectares of shade-grown coffee. There is an enormous potential for growth. Combining growing trees with farming supports the regeneration of vital natural environments; it protects and rebuilds biodiversity; it offers one of the most promising strategies to reverse global warming; it increases food production, and it improves the livelihoods of people. In the end, the message is very simple: Healthy forests create a healthy planet and healthy people.
Coffee cultivation with a whole berry focus can lead and inspire this critical trend. Taking coffee back into the forests where it belongs is a major first step. Subsequently, the farmer needs to be able to rely on a regular sales channel. There is a clear and established market for his shade-grown forest coffee. However, cascara is yet to be discovered as a superfood by a larger audience of consumers. How can the farmer rely on the cascara market while he changes his business? That is where the Coffee Pixels initiative offers the critical link.
Coffee Pixels may not be only and last initiative that offers coffee farmers a market for their whole coffee berries. There will be many more market opportunities for the cascara superfood. However, as outlined in the sidebar, a business model based on shade-grown coffee and cascara that is currently discarded as waste radically transforms the lives of farmers and adds ongoing value to rainforests. In the meantime, Raivis Vaitekuns has teamed up with experienced entrepreneurs and investors to take Coffee Pixels to a global audience. In France a revolutionary new factory is being built that will be a symbol for manufacturing in alignment with nature. The factory will be connected with forest farms in Madagascar and Colombia.
Coffee Pixels makes consumption of coffee a regenerative practice on a potentially massive scale. If Coffee Pixels only captures a small percentage of the big global market of energy bars and energy drinks, hundreds of thousands of hectares of rainforests will be regenerated. That kind of regenerative consumption does not exist in our current reality. That is the innovative coffee solution!
Excerpted from Gunter Pauli with Jurriaan Kamp, Coffee Solutions: How new business models for the world’s favorite beverage regenerate rainforests and restore livelihoods.
