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Cometeer coffee start up

‘Using science to brew incredible coffee from the world’s best beans’

Cometeer is the newest company in the booming US craft coffee industry, which is estimated to be worth $85-billion in five years. It aims to deliver coffee that has already been ground correctly and has been frozen to preserve the perfect taste and aroma.

The coffee — from popular craft brands like Equator, Counter Culture, Joe Coffee, and Birch — gets delivered in the form of frozen pucks, packaged in dry ice.

When you’re ready to drink it, you pop a puck into your cup, then fill it with boiling water, like some kind of fancy instant coffee. (You can also make it iced, with a splash of milk, or as a latte.)

The company promises that the end result retains all the complex flavours of the bean, as if a coffee expert had brewed it, at only $2 a cup, compared to the $5 demanded at a coffee shop.

“The best coffee has more flavor compounds than the best glass of wine,” says Matthew Roberts, co-founder and CEO of Cometeer. “But a lot of those compounds don’t actually make it into the consumer’s cup. Until I got into coffee, I thought it was just a bitter base for my cream and sugar.”

Trained as a computer scientist, Roberts started his career working at a software firm. It may seem like an odd background for a coffee entrepreneur, but it’s actually pretty useful.

For the past five years, he has been focused on building the machinery that will transform roasted beans into pucks. As he explored the chemistry of coffee, he decided the best way to preserve the complexity of flavour is by flash-freezing.

He believes that other methods, like dehydrating it or bottling it, would result in the loss of some flavour compounds.

A liquid nitrogen bath locks in the expansive flavor profiles developed through our innovative brewing process. The result is the most complex coffee you’ve never tasted. Keep our capsules in your freezer and simply melt into the beverage of your choice, hot or cold.

Cometeer website

Cometeer’s product has cost, logistical and packaging challenges that may well weigh against it, and thus has a tough road ahead in its effort to break through in this competitive market.

Despite this, the company has raised $50-million in VC funding, which will help it scale quickly and begin marketing to consumers. It is using part of this investment to expand its operations. Right now it has a small facility in Bedford, Massachusetts, but it is about to open a larger factory in Gloucester, a few towns over.

Cometeer has unveiled a pilot website and expects to be fully up and running by early 2021; in time, intending to expand into brick-and-mortar locations, including grocery stores.

FastCompany.com: Read the full article