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

News | Posted on Wednesday 22 September 2021

SEI Research Associate Eleni Michalopoulou features on a Russian television news segment discussing how researchers have managed to “farm” coffee in Finland through growing cells in a bioreactor.

Latte foam art. Photo: Fahmi Fakhrudin / Unsplash.
Latte foam art. Photo: Fahmi Fakhrudin / Unsplash.

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).

For all media enquiries please contact:

Frances Dixon
frances.dixon@york.ac.uk
+44 (0) 7859147820
@fdisxonSEI

For all media enquiries please contact:

Frances Dixon

Frances Dixon

Communication Manager

frances.dixon@york.ac.uk
+44 (0) 7859147820
fdisxonSEI

For all media enquiries please contact:

Frances Dixon
frances.dixon@york.ac.uk
+44 (0) 7859147820
@fdisxonSEI