Page 8 - Food & Drink magazine June 2021

✷ RISING STAR
The next caffeine hit
I Am Grounded co-founders Vanessa Murillo and Lachlan Powell are changing the way we look at coffee – as a food. Doris Prodanovic finds out how coffee fruit waste is upcycled into functional snack foods.
“It’s an American-based organisation that onboards businesses around the world and gives them support. They’re also in the process of releasing a label, similar to the organic certified label. It’s been a great support network as well, and we’ve been able
to hear from similar coffee fruit upcycling businesses and what they’re doing overseas.”
FOOD OVER DRINK
Murillo and Powell were determined to look at coffee as a food rather than a drink when experimenting with what they could make with the fruit by-product. The pair spent a year hand making the snack bars before partnering with a co-packing facility
in northern New South Wales, now manufacturing around 4000 bars per SKU, and is set to scale up.
“Coffee fruit is an interesting ingredient to work with and
it took us a while to put the recipe together,” recalls Powell.
“There are some companies overseas that are using the outside shell or husk – known as cascara in Spanish – and steep it like a tea. We wanted to look at the fruit as a food from the start, so we press the cascara into an extract, mix it with whole nuts and organic natural ingredients, and then make it into a raw bar.”
Many snack products are date-based, high in sugar, or have “unpronounceable ingredients”, Powell says, but I Am Grounded’s range aims to deliver a product with a natural source of caffeine, high in antioxidants, and a
way to snack sustainably.
IT is easy to forget that coffee is a fruit harvested solely for its beans – and it only makes up 10-20 per cent of the actual fruit. What we don’t see is
the 20 billion kilograms of coffee fruit waste produced globally each year as a result. This is equivalent to 3300 Olympic swimming pools. I Am Grounded is the Brisbane-based start-up here to remind us that the remaining 80-90 per cent of the fruit can be upcycled into something new that is good for both people and the planet.
Since launching in March 2019, I Am Grounded has upcycled 2450 kilograms of coffee fruit waste into functional snack bars, and subsequently diverted around 1960
kilograms of CO2 emissions. “When we harvest coffee
for the seeds rather than use the whole fruit, the part that isn’t used is thrown away; it simply rots,” I Am Grounded co-founder Vanessa Murillo tells Food & Drink Business. “As it ferments naturally it starts to decompose, creating mycotoxins. And with coffee farming regions being in high tropical rainforest areas, it rains often and that rain pours onto the rotting fruit which then leaches into surrounding waterways."
“It contaminates local waterways and creates CO2 emissions – we’re talking 16.6 million megatons.”
In many origin countries where coffee is grown, there is a lack of facilities to properly compost the mass scale of the waste produced, co-founder
Lachlan Powell adds. It is also a missed opportunity for farmers who can gain additional revenue by selling the coffee fruit waste before it gets to the rotting stage where it can then be upcycled into a concentrate
8 | Food&Drink business | June 2021 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au
“ We saw a gap in the market and thought we weren’t the only ones who want to snack right and snack sustainably.”
or as an extract, repurposing it into a new value cycle.
“We were the first Australian company to partner with the Upcycled Food Association, which is a growing global organisation focused on bringing upcycled foods to the mass market,” says Powell.
“Coffee fruit tastes like a stone fruit and pairs really well with chocolate, lemon and even coffee – it’s a versatile ingredient and tastes delicious,” adds Murillo. “We saw a gap in the market and thought we weren’t the only ones who want to snack right