Startup Coffee Flour Hopes to Turn Processed Cherries Into Big Business

Coffee Flour is made from processed coffee cherries.

A Seattle startup working with a pair of the world’s largest coffee companies is hoping to turn a product called Coffee Flour — milled from coffee cherry pulp — into big money.

Led by entrepreneur and former Starbucks technical services director Dan Belliveau, CF Global Holdings, Inc. has been backed by Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based invention incubator and patent security firm that has helped develop the supply contracts for the new product.

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The companies describe Coffee Flour as an ingredient for use in the food and beverage industries, claiming nutritional benefits such as high levels of protein, potassium and iron. Coffee Flour also contains caffeine, although the CF Global says the content is less per serving than what is found in a brewed cup of coffee. The product rollout is scheduled for 2015.

With a huge marketing launch today, CF Global is putting emphasis on the potential benefits of Coffee Flour to the environment, by diverting waste from coffee production, and to smallholder farmers, by returning a small portion of proceeds from retail sales to the farms.

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“Central to our business model is having the farmers and the mills share in the economics of this product,” says CF Global Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Andy Fedak. “So for every pound of flour sold a few cents is going to go to the mill, and a few cents is going to go to the farmer. We have that enshrined as part of the charter of this organization.”

The company is working with a couple of the world’s largest commodity coffee suppliers, includingEcom Coffee and Mercon, with operations currently underway in Hawaii, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Vietnam. CF Global hopes to eventually extend its source operations to virtually every coffee growing region in the world.

“Until today, coffee cherry pulp has been an unvalued byproduct resulting from the 17 billion pounds of coffee beans harvested around the world each year,” CF Global announced today. “Coffee Flour is produced by drying and milling the previously unvalued coffee cherry pulp, thereby creating a new and sustainable source of revenue for small-scale coffee farmers worldwide.”