The Coffee Cherry Company: Commercializing a new super-ingredient
Xinova ferried a visionary food innovation, Coffee Flour, across every phase of the innovation lifecycle, from idea to product-on-shelf, first in Japan and now in nine countries. Commercializing Coffee Flour required expansive use of Xinova’s unique global innovation market network to align demand with the funding, technology, and expertise necessary for transforming a great idea into a scalable, high-growth-potential product.
The problem: Coffee processing is wasteful
Each year, over 40 billion pounds of coffee cherry pulp is dumped into rivers or left to decompose in local ecologies when coffee beans are separated from their surrounding coffee cherries. Wasting all that fruit is a bad practice environmentally, and a missed opportunity economically.
Problems are a good thing
Inventor, Dan Belliveau pioneered a process to convert coffee cherry pulp into a nutrient-dense super-ingredient. But he lacked the resources and expertise to turn that idea into a real-life product.
Everything is solvable
Co-development partner, Xinova unblocks innovation by leveraging the world’s first and only platform-enabled innovation market network. Xinova aligns innovation and commercialization challenges with outstanding global expertise, technology, and capital resources across its diverse network of 12,000 innovators.
Partnering with Xinova, Belliveau launched Coffee Flour in Japan via connections within the Xinova innovation market network. Xinova remains co-invested in the continued success of Coffee Flour, which is now sold in nine countries.
“Our partnership with Xinova has been critical and has evolved with us. It is becoming more valuable all the time as it provides critical access to talent, capital, and demand.” – Dan Belliveau, Founder, Coffee Flour
The Coffee Flour collaboration demonstrates Xinova’s end-to-end innovation ecosystem’s key benefits.
- Co-innovation: Xinova transformed a great idea into a real-life product
- Talent: Key technical and business expertise tapped across the innovation life-cycle
- Technology: Discovered the right processes and IP to bring the product to scale
- Capital: Identified and obtained funding
- Business Development: Led global distribution and entries into new markets
- Expansion: Identifying new fields of use
- Long-term relationship: Xinova remains co-invested in Coffee Flour’s continued growth and success
The best innovation occurs when you do it in a networked way and provide a service with a partner that travels from ideation all the way through to product on a shelf. Xinova offers all that.”
– Paul Levins, Chief Strategy Officer, Xinova
Coffee Flour— an Earth-friendly, economically stimulating superfood
Converting discarded coffee fruit into a marketable high-growth-potential product carries numerous benefits for the Earth and local economies. For farmers and families in coffee growing countries, it creates sustainable jobs and a new revenue source in some of the poorest areas of the world. For the environment, it will remove botanical waste, reducing methane gas emissions and minimizing pollution of streams and soil.
Coffee Flour is a tasty super-ingredient that contains more fiber than whole grain wheat flour; more iron than spinach; more antioxidants than pomegranate; and more protein and potassium than fresh kale and bananas.
To learn more about our work with The Coffee Cherry Co check out the Case Study!