- The coffee industry has known about
the problems of coffee for over a decade.
The global demand of coffee
is encouraging coffee farmers
to deforest lands.
And with the growth of coffee,
production will have to triple
over the next 30 years.
And that means that almost
all of the last wild forests
that are left will have to be destroyed
to support the growth of coffee.
And that's what we're trying to avoid.
- In the heart of Seattle's Pike Place Market,
a team of food scientists
are working toward a better way
for Americans to start their morning.
- Atomo Coffee is the world's first molecular coffee.
We make coffee without the coffee bean.
We get asked, "Is Atomo coffee?"
And the answer is,
"Absolutely yes, you call it coffee!"
It is the entire experience of coffee.
Coffee is not just from a bush.
It is actually the experience
that you have in the morning,
and the result that you expect.
Coffee is really a ritual. That's what we replicate.
- Atomo's work with coffee is more
than an impressive feat of beverage engineering.
Atomo's mission is to rescue the very future of coffee.
This is "Just Might Work,"
a show about surprising solutions
to our biggest problems.
- My name is Andy Kleitsch,
and I'm the CEO of Atomo Coffee.
We love coffee, so we want it to be there
for a long, long time.
Where coffee is grown today is really susceptible
to climate change.
The temperature's rising in
these coffee-growing regions.
And when that happens,
coffee actually ripens too quickly.
And that means that it doesn't have all the flavors
that you would expect from coffee.
So what coffee farmers are doing,
is moving their coffee farms further uphill,
into virgin forests.
Coffee is such a huge industry.
It's almost hard to get your hands around how large it is.
If you think about just my own
personal coffee consumption,
it's really about two coffee bushes per month
that are required to just
support my coffee consumption.
So when we started Atomo three years ago, in a garage,
in Seattle, and we thought, "What is in a coffee cup?"
Coffee is a coffee bean. It's a seed of a cherry,
a coffee cherry.
So we looked at what other pits
and seeds are out there available today.
And we found that the Palm Date have a pit,
and those pits are a lot like coffee.
They're kind of the right size, the right shape.
The problem is
is that they don't taste anything like coffee.
And so we started experimenting
with ways to react this pit,
to change the pit,
to make it look more like a coffee bean, chemically.
And it turns out that there are 28 compounds
that you really have to have in a coffee cup
to taste like coffee.
So first, we started just buying
these compounds, purified, putting them in a cup,
blending them together, and tasting it.
If you really look at all the compounds in coffee,
there are some really strange notes that come out—
they'll say, 'Hints of green pepper.'
Like if you really geek out on coffee,
there are hints of green pepper in certain varieties.
So we said, "Oh, well, let's get green pepper compounds."
We look back at that first batch
and think, "That was pretty bad coffee."
But we could tell that it was possible.
- Atomo started homing in
on what they call the Big Five of Coffee:
Body,
Flavor,
Aroma,
Bioactives,
and Color.
So they went on a hunt for the raw materials
that can allow them to include all of the elements
that really make coffee, coffee.
- To make a coffee that's better for the planet,
we actually first started looking
at local ingredients from farmers.
And what we found was a lot of these ingredients
that are thrown away,
actually have a lot of precursor compounds for coffee.
So what we really focused on
was upcycled ingredients.
We recently sold our first cold brew online.
With cold brew, we can control the entire experience.
We can put it in a recyclable can,
and we know exactly how it's going to taste.
And we know exactly every time
that the consumer is going to
experience Atomo in its perfect state.
- The extra challenge with coffee
is that people have all sorts of preferences
when it comes to what they're
looking for in their brew.
- When we first set out to recreate the perfect cup
of coffee, we immediately started an argument
amongst ourselves on,
'What is the perfect cup of coffee?'
It turns out no one can agree.
Some people like it dark and black and roasty.
Some people like it light with milk in it,
and cream and sugar.
70% of people add cream and sugar to their coffee,
which to me really means
they don't like the taste of coffee.
Coffee's quite bitter, right?
And a lot of people don't like that bitterness.
So one day, we were in the lab making coffee;
we didn't have the bitter compounds,
and we tried it anyway.
And we're like, "You know what?
This is what coffee should taste like."
It had all the roasty, toasty notes.
It really smelled like coffee, tastes like coffee,
but it didn't punch you in the face,
like a cup of coffee typically would.
- Atomo plans to make all sorts
of different coffee varieties for different preferences.
But what they really cared about doing first
was making sure their coffee really did taste like coffee.
Naturally, we had to try the stuff.
So Atomo set up a blind taste test.
- I would say we could film closer to these,
but I spilled all over myself, so I don't know.
- Smells like coffee. Oh, that's like chocolate.
It has all of the like coffee things,
but tastes definitely, like, unique.
In order of preference: is this one, this one,
this one, this one.
- This one is ours, this is our Classic.
And then 608 is our Ultra Smooth.
- Okay.
- While I could distinguish one
of Atomo's cold brews as separate from the rest,
at least to me,
the samples were equal to what I expect coffee to taste,
smell, and feel like.
- We've removed all the negative defects of coffee
and made, really, an ultrasmooth,
perfect cup of coffee.
And now what we're working on here in our factory
is coffee grounds.
So we're actually recreating
the ground coffee experience.
We really set out to recreate every aspect of coffee.
And it's really about the ritual.
It's something that you do every morning,
but you also expect that result.
We always had this dream that we're going
to recreate the coffee bean.
For us, the bean is really just this magical vessel
that releases its freshness when you grind it.
Will coffee ever officially be extinct?
Will it ever go away forever?
I don't think it will,
because the demand is simply too high.
It will just start moving to places
where it wasn't grown before.
It'll move to Florida; there's talk of coffee in Florida.
We always thought that doing
something better for the planet
was actually going to make it harder for us
to be successful.
And what we found is the complete opposite.
Once we became singularly
focused on doing something better
for the planet, all of a sudden,
then we had the customers that were interested
in doing something better for the planet.
We had investors that are interested
in doing something better for the planet.
We would like to see Atomo deliver coffee for the future
in a way that is sustainable, that is carbon-negative.
That is what we're enabling. That's the future that we see.