Coffee That Helps The Planet

Growing up in Costa Rica, Maricel Saenz was intimately familiar with the role that coffee played in the country’s households. The beverage even had a separate mealtime in her house. “You had your breakfast, your morning snack, lunch, and then your el café with a pastry, followed by dinner,” Saenz explains.

Coffee was introduced to Costa Rica in the late 1700s. Crops thrived in the warm climate and quickly became the country’s main export, shaping the national economy and culture. The nation’s wealthiest families can trace their roots to coffee farm owners, known as "familias cafetaleras." Moreover, it’s become an integral part of Costa Rican society. “To me, coffee is a reason to get to know someone better,” Saenz says. “It’s a really big part of our national identity and who we are.”

Seeing coffee production firsthand, Saenz became increasingly aware of the dangers that the industry posed to the planet and the livelihoods of her fellow countrymen. Coffee is both a victim and a perpetrator of climate change, Saenz is fond of saying. Erratic rain patterns and warming temperatures are ruining harvests, forcing farmers to plant their crops at increasingly higher altitudes.

This problem is not specific to Costa Rica. Brazil, which produces 40% of the world’s coffee, is likely to lose 79% of its farming land by 2050, due to climate change and soil degradation. Coffee is also a significant source of CO₂ emissions, which accelerate climate change. “It’s putting the supply chain at high risk,” says Saenz. “So we’ll not only have less coffee, but we’ll have less good coffee.”

Innovation is urgently needed to combat the industry’s contributions to climate change. Saenz’s solution was to launch Compound Foods, which leverages precision fermentation to create the same compounds found in a typical cup of coffee, but without the beans. Aided by investors from SVLC, Humboldt Ventures and Lower Carbon Capital, Saenz is focusing on perfecting the coffee’s flavor profile through food science and fermentation, while scaling production to reach the mass market. Compound Food’s cold brew coffee has already been well-received by tasters, and even earned the approval of coffee experts in Costa Rica.

As one can imagine, it’s challenging being an innovator in a space so focused on an existential threat like climate change. Saenz believes that climate-focused startups will play a critical role in the fight against climate change, as will the VCs who care enough about the future of the planet to get involved.

Compound Foods leverages precision fermentation to create the same compounds found in a typical cup of coffee, but without the beans

“We need to understand that our lifestyle and way of consuming products are just eating [away at] someone else’s time,” says Saenz. “The more we can get people to care about their legacy and solutions, [the more] we can get the right kind of capital. It needs to come from a problem-solving point of view.”