A German entrepreneur has invented an in-home machine that quickly turns raw beans into a freshly brewed cup of coffee, racking up 5,000 preorders as consumers search for the perfect brew and retailers hunt for new ways tap the coffee market.
Inventor Hans Stier says his Bonaverde machine’s ability to roast beans at the optimum temperature and for just the right amount of time — and almost as quickly as filter brewing machines — sets it above the crowd of current coffee makers.
As coffee consumption is increasingly associated with sophistication in its arabica-focused markets, novelty in preparation has become big business as more cafes boast trained baristas and sales boom in markets, such as the US$8 billion single-serve segment, dominated by Nestle’s Nespresso.
“This is the freshest coffee you’ll ever taste,” said Stier, the CEO of Bonaverde, who quit work as a lawyer in 2011 to pursue the project by amassing almost US$2.5 million through crowdfunding sources such as Kickstart, Indiegogo and Seedmatch.
The table-top machine, slightly taller than a regular coffee maker, drew curious gazes while on display this week at the Colombia’s Coffee Growers’ Federation congress in Bogota, as beans swirled inside its tiny roasting chamber, glowing orange while a fresh brew trickled into the pot below.
Besides making for a tastier brew, unroasted beans stay fresher longer than pre-roasted beans.
Stier says the machine also boosts growers’ profits by cutting out middlemen and delivering raw beans straight to consumers.
Coffee often changes hands more than 100 times from farm to store shelf.
Buyers would be able to find the profile of the farmer who produced their beans on an app, Stier said.
The machine is set to retail for about US$650 and only roast coffee supplied through Bonaverde’s grower network.
Coffee bags will contain a microchip to start the machine and dictate the perfect brewing process.
The coffee maker will also give feedback on user consumption and preferences to the company via Wi-Fi.
The German-engineered machine will be produced in China from about the middle of next year.
Retailers including Target, Europe’s Media Markt and online trader Amazon are interested, but for now, Stier says Bonaverde would sell only on its Web site.
“We’ll keep that option open,” Stier said.
Stier admits to some sleepless nights as design problems appeared.
The original round wooden-cased machine is now rectangular and metal to withstand the forces of grinding beans and temperatures needed to roast the beans.
However, his goal remains unchanged.
“It’s as if you were drinking the coffee right on the farm,” one passerby at the coffee congress said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts