Can Coffee Be Grown in a Lab?

For thousands of years, coffee has come from trees which have been cultivated from the ground. Could that be about to change? A team of Finnish scientists want to find out. Two years ago, researchers from the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, announced that they had created “coffee cell powder,” biological material created from coffee cell cultures. Sounds appetizing? Last month, December 2023, they published a proof of concept in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The results? Closer to coffee than you might think!

What exactly is this coffee cell powder? The researchers started with the leaves of a coffee tree and used them to grow plant cells. These plants cells are called callus, which are simply generic plant cells that don’t serve any specialized function. This means instead of replicating a bunch of coffee leaf cells, they were able to replicate generic “coffee” cells. After putting this plant material in a bioreactor to speed up reproduction, they were freeze dried for storage. The result was a fine white powder.

That may sound great, but did it work? The researchers roasted the coffee cell powder and then put it to the test against commercially available coffee, which they also roasted to controlled specifications. The lab grown coffee held its own, but the researchers admitted that there is still a lot of room for improvement.

The color was quite close to commercial coffee. Once the coffee cell powder was roasted, it did resemble fine coffee grounds. When brewed in a controlled setting, the taste and aroma of the lab grown coffee tasted… similar. It had many of the same bitter and acidic flavors of coffee, though they said the taste leaned more on the smokey, rubbery side when it was roasted too dark. The aroma was comparable but lacked some of the complex smells that come from a standard cup of coffee. Though, the researchers are hopeful that more fine tuning of the roasting process can bring the flavor profile closer to the beverage we know and love.

Heiko Rischer, the lead author of the study, said in the press release, “Our wish is that the publication of this paper, which clearly demonstrates proof of concept for lab-grown coffee, nudges 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.”

What do you think? Would you drink coffee grown from a lab? For us at Solid State, we’re going to wait until the scientists do a little more research, but we’re excited to see what they come up with next. Until then, you can enjoy all-natural, freshly roasted coffee from us every day.