Growing, harvesting and roasting the coffee beans for your morning cup of java generates a lot of waste. But a Vancouver-based startup company now turns coffee castoffs into bread, cakes and pasta dough. Coffee beans are actually seeds, extracted from fruits called coffee cherries. Once coffee producers remove the beans, the leftover fruit is usually cast aside and left to decompose. That is, until a company called CF Global Holdings came up with a method to convert the discarded fruit into nutritious flour. This coffee flour is gluten free and contains more iron than spinach, more protein than kale, and more fiber than whole grain flour, Businessweek reports.
It doesn't contain high levels of caffeine — a person would need to consume 16 slices of coffee flour bread to get the jolt of one cup of joe. And instead of tasting like coffee, the flour's flavor has hints of floral citrus and roasted fruit. "My wife made some shortbread cookies and granola," CF Global’s Dan Belliveau told Businessweek.
"When it actually tasted good we thought, wow, we've got something here.” In addition to minimizing waste from coffee production, Belliveau also hopes the flour will help coffee growers take home additional income, and give them a leg up in a globally competitive market. Coffee flour is currently being produced in factories in Hawaii, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico and Vietnam. The flour should be available for purchase by next year,according to the coffee flour website
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Photo credit: AFNR/Shutterstock
