Researchers reveal lab-grown coffee recipe to create cellular agriculture-based brews

14 Dec 2023 --- As climate change batters coffee production worldwide, innovators are creating lab-grown brews formulated using bioreactors instead of beans. Food scientists are utilizing cellular agriculture techniques to bypass traditional methods and create a new coffee ecosystem of the future.

We speak with Dr. Heiko Rischer, principal scientist and head of plant biotechnology at the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT) that conducted the research, to explore the technology behind creating coffee without soil and key trends driving innovation in producing sustainable coffee.

“Consumers are increasingly aware and critical of the environmental footprint of products. They want to know the individual steps in the production. With traditional coffee this is notoriously difficult,” he tells Food Ingredients First.

“The biotechnological approach is fully transparent with a far less complex value chain and can operate locally.”

“Cells from a coffee plant are propagated and grown under sterile conditions in a bioreactor. The cell biomass is then harvested, dried and roasted. The coffee drink is brewed normally and is 100% real coffee, not a substitute,” he details.

For the study, the scientists used commercial Coffea arabica seedlings (Plantagen Finland Oy, Vantaa, Finland) as a source for leaf explants. For biomass production, the coffee cells were cultivated in a wave bioreactor.

Dr. Rischer with the lab-grown coffee plants in the greenhouse (Image credit: Vesa Kippola).Published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, the study describes the exact process the scientists used to produce coffee starting from the original coffee plant itself. It also details how they established cell cultures to alter the bean’s aroma in the roasting process, caffeine content, flavor analysis and sensory profiling by a panel of tasters.

Alternatives to traditional methods
Cellular agriculture is a promising alternative to produce plant-based commodities such as coffee, which are conventionally produced by farming, says the study. 

This is critical as the global coffee industry battles issues with land use, climate change and sustainability amid skyrocketing demands. For instance, studies state that excessive heat is reducing the habitats of flowering plants, leading to a drop in the insects that pollinate coffee crops by 61%.

Compared to other agricultural products, coffee also has a high carbon footprint, accounting globally to 33–126 billion kg CO2 per annum, which is in the range of the annual emissions of countries like Denmark and the Philippines, highlights the study.

Europe is a major market for coffee. According to the Centre for the Promotion of Imports, the region imported over 3,602 thousand tons (3.6 million tons) of green coffee in 2021, with an estimated average of 5 kg of coffee consumed per person each year.

Lab-grown coffee can help tackle such demands and sustainably mitigate the main issues in coffee production, note the scientists. These include more “regional self-sufficiency” in areas with climates unsuitable for coffee bean farming. 

“The technique allows coffee production at any premises where a bioreactor can be operated,” explains Dr. Rischer.

Moreover, producing coffee cells in a bioreactor has the potential to “speed up” coffee production significantly, the study highlights.

“Traditionally farmed coffee provides one to two harvests per year, whereas a new batch of lab-grown coffee can be made in a month due to the controlled process and the infinitely renewable nature of coffee plant cells that removes the need to grow new coffee plants from seeds.”

Conventional versus lab-grown
The first batches of cell culture-based coffee formulated by the team two years ago smelled and tasted like conventional coffee.

The coffee cell samples were studied as per the color spacer defined by the International Commission of Illumination (Image credit: Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry).The new study adapted the complex process of drying and roasting for bioreactor-grown coffee cells to generate a coffee-like aroma and flavor. The brews resulting from different roasting regimes were characterized by chemical and sensory evaluation-based approaches and compared to conventional coffee.

The team also studied green unroasted coffee beans to demonstrate that the roasting process causes similar changes in pre ground coffee material as in the novel cell coffee material.

“Our recent work shows clear differences in the flavor profiles of lab-grown and conventional coffee. Not all flavor compounds are present or abundant enough. This means the production process must be improved and optimized for the full potential of lab-grown coffee,” underscores Dr. Rischer.

When compared to conventional coffee, the dominant odor and flavor attributes were “burned sugar-like and smoky but less roasted.” The intensities of bitterness and sourness were similar to those of conventional coffee, notes the study.

Pioneering a new coffee type
Dr. Rischer further flags that the journey of lab-grown coffee to grocery store shelves and people’s kitchens is anything but complete. He calls for an ecosystem dedicated to the production and commercialization of lab-grown coffee.

“It’s one thing to grow coffee cells in a bioreactor. Making it a commercially viable product is a whole other matter,” he elaborates.

A myriad of factors impact the end product. From the raw material derived from different cultivars and species, the soil, the elevation, climate and even the year when the particular coffee beans were grown, plus the processes of “roasting, fermentation, brewing,” all play a crucial role in coffee production.

“While lab-grown coffee is much more controlled, different approaches to, for example, roasting significantly impact the aroma profile of the coffee, which is a key consideration for the consumer,” he continues.

The team freeze dried the cultured coffee cells, followed by roasting, brewing and sensory profiling by GC-olfactometry (Image credit: Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry).

The way forward
With the publication of the proof of concept for lab-grown coffee, the team aims to “nudge forward” the creation of an ecosystem or a collective that has the resources, know-how and drive to pioneer an entirely new type of coffee.

The researchers deem the transformation “a huge challenge,” but one VTT is prepared to take on with the right partners and experts.

Meanwhile, the team is optimistic about the innovation’s market acceptability and shares that there is “general openness” to new approaches from consumers and companies due to the foreseen problems with coffee supply. 

“We expect visionary companies to see the benefits and we want to team up with them to make it happen,” Dr. Rischer concludes.

In other sustainable coffee advances, Illy Caffè launched the "world’s first" coffee with a regenerative agriculture label in October, which signifies improvement in biodiversity, rebalancing of the ecosystem’s natural functions, sequestration of atmospheric CO2 and an increase in the water, carbon and nutrient cycles.

By Insha Naureen