Kaffe Bueno scores €1.1m to unlock the health potential of coffee’s by-products

29 Oct 2020 --- Danish biotech start-up Kaffe Bueno – which upcycles coffee by-products into active and functional ingredients for cosmetics, nutraceuticals and functional foods – has secured a €1.1 million (US$1.2 million) investment. The funding will scale up production and further process and product development.

“Our goal is to play an important role in the up-and-coming bio-economy by unlocking the health potential of coffee, using its by-product and upcycling it into health-promoting ingredients,” says Juan Medina, CEO and co-founder of Kaffe Bueno.

“Our pure Kaffe Bueno Oil is already available globally for high-end personal care products and our versatile Kafflour is being used for healthy baking. With this capital injection, we can really switch the gears and scale up production to meet customer demands and accelerate the development of our next wave of products,” he adds.

The investor’'s list includes PINC, Paulig Group venture capital, Vækstfonden, The Yield Lab (IE), and a Danish angel investor. 

Boosting existing structures
Kaffe Bueno plans to use the seed capital to:

• Launch new food, nutraceutical, and cosmetic ingredients into the market throughout 2021 and 2022.
• Scale-up production of its existing ingredients to meet growing demand.
• Cover intellectual property rights (IPR) costs for patents for their technologies and processes.
• Grow its team.

The start-up uses green chemistry and biotechnology to upcycle coffee by-products into functional ingredients. (Source: Givaudan Active Beauty)“Kaffe Bueno is a good fit for PINC and Paulig, who have been delivering coffee grounds to it for the past year,” says Marika King, head of PINC. 

“At PINC, we aim to support start-ups with a strategic, financial and societal focus and impact. Kaffe Bueno scores high on all of these parameters. Paulig is a front-runner when it comes to ensuring sustainability within the coffee industry and what could be more sustainable than getting better use out of the industry’s by-products?”

Valuable molecules in coffee

Kaffe Bueno says its mission is to unlock coffee’s health potential where harmful emissions are minimized and coffee’s by-product usability is maximized. So far, its circular business model has yielded three products that are currently on the market: 

• Kaffe Bueno oil, a lipid used in personal care and food products. 
• Kafflour, a gluten-free fiber- and protein-rich functional flour.
• Kaffibre, an upcycled natural exfoliant for cosmetics.

Kaffe Bueno oil is sold as an active ingredient for anti-aging, moisturizing and protective skincare due to its richness in antioxidants and essential fatty acids. It can be found as an ingredient in cosmetic brands across Denmark, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and the US.

In June 2020, Kaffe Bueno partnered with Givaudan – the Swiss-based global leader of flavors, fragrances and beauty ingredients – to globalize its coffee oil. Givaudan commercializes Kaffe Bueno’s oil under the trade name “Koffee’ Up.”

“The balance of Koffee’ Up between saturated and unsaturated fatty acids helps the oil to quickly penetrate the skin layers. Koffee’ Up is the first coffee oil with demonstrated results on skin repair and improvement of antioxidant defense,” Melanie Duprat, category manager at Givaudan Active Beauty, told NutritionInsight at the time.

Why care about coffee waste?
Almost 10 billion kg of coffee are traded yearly worldwide, says Kaffe Bueno. More than 30 percent is consumed in the EU. When brewing a cup of coffee, less than 1 percent of its health-beneficial compounds end up in the cup, making it also one of the most wasteful beverages. 

The remaining 99 percent left remains intact in the coffee grounds, which usually end up in landfills or use for energy production.

Kaffe Bueno’s circular biorefinery model takes advantage of the whole spectrum of bioactive molecules within coffee and commercializes them as ingredients within the WellCare sector. 

To produce these, it uses environmentally friendly technologies that recycle heat, water and CO2, enabling emissions reductions in coffee’s value chain.

When the final destination of coffee grounds is in landfills, as it is the case in most countries, they decompose and generate metric tons of methane. 

The worldwide emissions of coffee waste are equivalent to the yearly emissions of 10 million cars, the company supports.

Edited by Kristiana Lalou