Media: Finns have learned how to make coffee in a bioreactor to save the planet

Climate change poses a huge risk to both the global trade of agricultural commodities and food security. These risks are critical and mounting, but until now have remained 

The people of Finland drink the most coffee in the world, but coffee plants do not grow in the Finnish climate. They have learned how to “grow” their own coffee a different way: in a laboratory.

The technology they are using does not involve the whole coffee plant or even the coffee beans. In fact, it is the leaves of the coffee plant that are cultivated in bioreactors to produce new cells. These are then grown in petri dishes, harvested and placed in a fermentation machine. The resulting biomass is dried, roasted and brewed.

The taste, they say, is almost indistinguishable.

SEI Research Associate Eleni Michalopoulou poses the question, “if there is already meat from a test tube, now here is coffee, then what next?”

In a commercial laboratory in Helsinki, scientists have recreated wheat from soil bacteria. In a similar method to the Finnish coffee growing, American scientists have generated chicken protein from poultry feathers. In Russia, there are hopes of synthesizing caviar. The most difficult food to synthesize so far appears to be red meat.

Read the full article and watch the video on 5TV (in Russian).