How a Failed Cattle Feed Became the Latest Gluten-Free Flour

In the 2014-2015 season, global coffee production reached a dizzying 17 billion pounds. But most of what's produced by the industry is pure waste: after plucking out the lucrative coffee bean, at the center of a sweet, fleshy fruit called a coffee cherry, coffee producers across the world find themselves left with a decaying heap of waste. As these mountains of rotting coffee cherries sit around, they become a huge nuisance to farmers, who can use a limited amount of the organic matter as a not-super-effective crop fertilizer, but mostly ends up getting shoved into local waterways or ditches. This costs growers space, time, and money.

That's where Dan Belliveau comes in. Formerly the director of technical services at Starbucks, Belliveau knows a thing or two about the coffee industry. After leaving the multinational corporation and continuing his work in coffee at his own consulting firm, Belliveau was struck with an idea: make use, somehow, of all that wasted coffee cherry pulp, creating an extra revenue source for coffee growers and providing a sustainable use for a product that has historically found its way into the garbage.

Along with his partner Andrew Fedak, Belliveau has created coffee flour—a high-protein, high-fiber, gluten-free "flour" that's the result of slow-drying coffee cherry pulp and grinding it into a fine powder. In March, Blue Hill chef Dan Barber featured coffee flour in a sorbet served for dessert at WastED, his pop-up that served dishes made from ingredients that are typically discarded. The Brooklyn bakery Izzy & Em's is using coffee flour in its brownies, coffee cakes, and cookies; and last Friday, Google announced that it would be incorporating the ingredient into meals served in its offices in Mountain View, California, and New York City.

We caught up with Belliveau to talk about coffee flour's conception and its potential to reduce waste and boost the incomes of farmers around the world.

MUNCHIES: Hi, Dan. So, first things first: can you tell me how you got the idea for coffee flour? Dan Belliveau: It's one of the 25-years-in-the-making kind of ideas. Having spent a lot of time in the coffee industry, it's always been there in the back of my mind; it's always been a problem that had to be solved. After I left Starbucks in 2002, I started up my own supply chain consulting firm. And ten years into that, I was working with a coffee roasting company. I had a meeting with its owner, who had just bought into a farm in Central America. He had come back, and he was like, "Gee, Dan, I've just been to the farm, and we've just finished harvest, and we've got acres and acres of this rotting cherry up to my neck—isn't there something we can do with it?" And at that moment, all of these years of thinking and solving other problems kind of collided into a few seconds of craziness, and it just sort of popped into my head: Well, why can't we take this, grind it up, and use it for something? And the words "coffee flour" just came into my head.

How come no one has thought of this before? Are there other edible applications for coffee cherries? People had sort of batted around ideas before. In the late 60s and early 70s, there were some professors from Brazil and Columbia who did some research, and what they thought is that coffee cherries could be used as a feed for cattle. Because harvest happens over a three- to four-month period, and you get large, large volumes of this, they were like, "How do we get rid of it?" So they said, "OK, let's take the wet pulp, and let's mix it into cattle feed at a high, high percentage, and let's see what happens." Knowing that the cherries themselves were safe, because pickers in the field have eaten coffee cherries for hundreds of years—you snack on it when you're picking cherries in the field. So when they fed it to the cows, at the end of the study, what they found was that the control cows, who hadn't been fed the coffee cherries, had gained X amount of weight, and were in C health condition. The cows that had been fed the coffee cherries were in good health condition, but had lost weight. And that's not what the goal is when we feed cows; it's "how do we put weight on them?" As it turns out, one of the antioxidants in coffee cherries is is an acid called chlorogenic acid. And chlorogenic acid is used in a lot of diet items as an appetite suppressant. So they were feeding cows hundreds of pounds of cherries that had appetite suppressant in them, so as the cows would eat, they'd go, "I'm full," and they'd stop eating. So research in that area effectively stopped in the early 70s.

Why has coffee cherry traditionally been a waste product? In the mills that we're working at right now, the way that it works is that the farmers will harvest the cherries, they bring the cherries to the mills and sell them. But they're only getting paid for the bean portion of that cherry. The mills then take that cherry and they process it, and because they're a central processing point, they're taking product in from thousands of farmers. And as the product comes in, they're dealing with huge amounts of waste. So as the waste volume builds up at the mill, what they're focused on is the bean. They're like, "We've got to get the bean out of the cherry, we've got to get it dried, because that's where the money is." So they just take the cherry and put it in big piles, and at the end of harvest, they go, "Well, now what do we do with it?" And by that time, three or four months have gone by, and it's just a rotting pile. About 20 to 25 percent of the product is used as compost, or fertilizer. But if you use all of it, it becomes a nuisance in the field, so there's always a waste stream.

So that's what our proposition changes. You're selling the whole cherry, not just the bean. That's what we're showing the mills we're working with how to do, is to dry the product, and to demonstrate that if you treat it this way, this can become another revenue stream. There's about 17 billion pounds of dried green beans available on the market on an annual basis. So that's about 85 to 90 billion pounds of fruit. So then we see there's about 40 billion pounds of wet fruit available, and if we dry it, we get somewhere between 8 and 10 billion pounds of dried coffee flour ultimately.

What does coffee flour taste like, and how can it be used in cooking? Well, the first thing is that it doesn't taste like coffee. But what you do get are some of the nuances that are present in coffee: the fruit notes, the spicy notes. Depending on the region where the coffee is grown, you get some extra-sweet notes, some peach notes, citrus notes, some peppery notes. When you add it to baked goods, to breads, to pastas, to things like that, it adds a little bit of a sweet note, with a bit of an earthy finish, a sort of green tobacco leaf flavor that goes across your whole palate. When we blend it in with chocolate, it has a different attribute. Some of the acids in the coffee flour mask some of the bitter notes in chocolate with high percentages of cocoa. That means you can reduce some of the sugar in the chocolate you use, and it also brings out some of the spicy notes that are inherent in cocoa. So it makes a 60 percent chocolate taste more like a 70 percent chocolate.

At what kind of scale are you producing coffee flour? In our '12/'13 season, we did a couple of thousand pounds. In '13/'14, we went up to 250,000 pounds. This last harvest, in '14/'15, we did about a million and a half pounds. And the harvest that's coming up, '15/'16, we're going to do between five and seven million pounds. And the projection after that is 50 to 60 million pound range.

How will having a use for coffee cherry pulp aid coffee growers? If you look at the process now at origin, the cherry not only has no value. It actually has a negative value, because it costs growers to do something with it. Even if they just have it as a pile, and decide they're going to push it into a river, or into a ditch, that takes labor, it takes time, it takes up land. A good rule of thumb is that if you look at coffee beans sold, the amount paid to a farmer is about 80 or 85 cents per pound of green beans, and it costs them 75 to 80 cents to make that pound of product. So their margins are 5 cents, maybe 10 cents, if all the stars align.

We're not asking to the farmer to do any more work. All we're saying is, grow the quality cherry product that you do, and when you come in, you're gonna get some more money. That ends up being pure profit to them, because it doesn't add any more cost.

Thanks for speaking with me.