Over the past century, the world has fallen in love with coffee. In fact, a
significant percentage of the global population now relies on it every single
morning.
Culturally ingrained in daily ritual for centuries in both ancient Mecca and
Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire helped spread the caffeinated
beverage throughout the
Middle East and Europe. By the 20th century, the greatest concentration
of coffee cultivation was in the Western Hemisphere — especially Brazil and
Colombia — while Vietnam became the main supplier for those in the far
east and much of the globe.
For many today, coffee is perceived as equally essential as water.
A 2021
report
by National Coffee Data Trends found that 60 percent of US consumers drink
more coffee than water (or any other beverage for that matter). According to the
Food
Institute,
younger generations are also drinking more coffee than in the past — with 65
percent of millennials in their twenties and thirties drinking coffee within the
past 24 hours — setting a record for that age group.
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Coffee consumption has also increased among younger Gen Zers; and while this is
great news for the coffee industry, it’s problematic for the planet.
The planetary impacts of coffee production
To understand the environmental consequences of coffee, it’s important to
understand its lifecycle — by way of a lifecycle
assessment
(LCA). This looks at everything from its initial production and processing on
the farm to subsequent distribution, roasting, packaging, brewing, and
everything else; all the way to disposal, which includes packaging waste.
Here we’ll focus just on the [cultivation stage] (https://www.oregon.gov/deq/filterdocs/pef-coffee-fullreport.pdf),
which has some of the heaviest impacts.
Coffee production is in the list of top-five foods that emit the highest amount
of greenhouse gas emissions, according to Oxford University’s Our World in
Data.
One of the key factors in this commodity’s environmental impact is that it
requires land — lots of it — and mostly from some of the most biodiverse
ecosystems on the planet: the world’s rainforests. In fact, for every cup of
coffee consumed, approximately one square inch of
rainforest
is destroyed.
Not only does this ultimately leave countless species of fauna without a
habitat, it also destroys valuable carbon sinks — ecosystems that absorb carbon
from the atmosphere. Tropical forests can hold up to 247 gigatons of
carbon
— over seven times the amount human activities emit every year. When they are
cut or burned to make room for coffee plantations, these trees release the
carbon they stored during their lifetime instead of absorbing it.
And, as with a host of other popular commodities, their biodiverse growing regions are already feeling the effects of climate change — many coffee farmers around the world are now at the mercy of irregular weather conditions that can severely impact their crops.
Cultivating a solution
One potential remedy to the environmental problem of coffee production — one
that doesn’t ask billions around the world to quit their favorite caffeinated
drink — is coffee made from plant cells.
Many of us are already familiar with the idea of cell-based, or cultivated,
meat,
dairy
and even
egg
products — which are produced from animal and dairy cells — and
are growing in popularity as potentially sustainable alternatives to the
conventional versions of those foods produced through land- and
resource-intensive animal agriculture. Cell-based coffee is produced in a
similar fashion.
It starts with the extraction of DNA from the coffee leaf. The cells are then
bio-printed onto scaffolds, which can then be made into coffee without the need
for growing more coffee plants in places that would otherwise be covered in
rainforest.
VTT Technical Research Centre of
Finland
has been producing coffee cells in a bioreactor by way of cellular agriculture
and says it has successfully made lab-grown coffee that actually smells and
tastes like coffee.
“We help companies innovate and come up with new solutions,” Heiko
Rischer, head of plant
biotechnology at VTT, told Sustainable Brands®.
He explained that they “generate biomass using the coffee plant cells
— growing them in bioreactors in a contained vessel — and then make the
beverage out of that.”
With regard to taste, Rischer admitted that VTT “is using undifferentiated
cells” and how “this is one type of cell in the bioreactor — whereas a coffee
bean has multiple cell types which have different functions.” In layman's terms,
the taste may not be a 100 percent match, due to the nature of coffee plants.
Those involved in the creation of cellular coffee admit it still has a way to go
before it can be produced at scale. Then, there’s the need to obtain the
necessary approvals by governments to distribute it at a commercial level — not
to mention the continued fine-tuning needed before the resulting beverage would
please the palates of coffee connoisseurs.
“This is just the initial testing exercise. What we could see from both chemical
analyses and sensory evaluations is that you have hundreds of compounds in a
normal roasted coffee — and in our material you have a certain fraction of that;
but nevertheless, you can recognize it as coffee — even though it’s not yet an
optimized product,” the Finnish researcher explained. “Either way, when you buy a coffee at a shop, it’s usually a blended material.
Brands always make sure they have a consistent flavor.”
If researchers can bridge the gap in taste between coffee that was cultivated in
the field and that cultivated in a lab, it could eventually be a win-win for
coffee lovers and biodiversity alike.
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Roberto Guerra is a bilingual writer, editor, entrepreneur, corporate engagement and communications specialist, and US Air Force veteran with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Universidad de la Sabana (Bogota, Colombia) and an International Master in Sustainable Development and Corporate Responsibility from EOI Business School (Madrid, Spain). Born in New York and raised in Florida, Roberto is former managing director for the Spanish-language version of vegan business magazine "vegconomist" and is also author of three novels. He has lived, worked and studied on four different continents.
Published Mar 11, 2024 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 12pm GMT / 1pm CET