A few years ago, Raivis Vaitekuns and his cousins Andris and Gundars Vaitekuns wanted to bring specialty coffee to the Latvian public. The trio had opened a coffee shop, called Miit Coffee, in Riga in 2010 but were eager to share their passion with a larger market.
First, they tried bottled cold brew coffee, but it didn't take off. "We did an experiment for one season, which wasn't really successful, because of the weather conditions in Latvia," says Raivis Vaitekuns. "There's not a very long summer, and people don't really get into cold coffee."
So they came up with another idea: What if they could make coffee edible? After some experimentation – and an initial concoction that Vaitekuns says was "not delicious" – the team came up with a recipe that mixed coffee beans with cocoa butter and a few other ingredients to produce a small bar that has the unmistakeable taste of a strong cup of coffee and about the same amount of caffeine as an espresso shot. They founded Solid Coffee in December 2016 and named their product Coffee Pixels.
The Coffee Pixels bars are small - each is only 10g - and come in foil packaging. There are two flavours, milk and cascara. Cascara refers to the remains of the coffee fruit, or "cherry", once the coffee bean is removed – a by-product that in some places is dried and turned into a kind of tea.
Vaitekuns explains that Solid Coffee originally came up with the milk version of Coffee Pixels, but it didn't quite suit their taste for the acidity and fruitiness of specialty drip coffee. They were also keen to develop a product that minimized the waste produced by the coffee industry. Adding cascara to a milk-free recipe allowed them to develop a flavour that was more like straight-up edible coffee while making use of a part of the coffee fruit that usually goes to waste.
If you haven't heard of cascara, you're not alone. In fact, it's not technically legal to sell it as a food product in the EU. This is because it is considered a "novel food", which means that it has no significant history of consumption in the EU before May 1997. The UK Food Standards Agency explains explains that cascara would therefore need a "pre-market safety assessment and authorization before it can be sold as a food anywhere in the EU".
An application for the authorization of cascara has been submitted on behalf of another company, coffee merchant Panama Varietals, and this is currently going through the evaluation process. Until it is approved, however, it's not meant to be sold as food. A representative from the Food and Veterinary Service in Latvia confirmed that, "Currently it is not legal to sell products containing dried berries (or 'cherries') of the coffee plant".
Solid Coffee is aware of the status of cascara but says that it has not had any issues with selling Coffee Pixels so far. The company is avoiding selling in countries that have taken a more proactive line in enforcing the EU regulation and removing cascara products from sale, such as the UK. Vaitekuns says that cascara was available in specialty coffee shops before people realized that it would need novel food authorization, and that Solid Coffee started making Coffee Pixels before learning that it could be an issue.
Solid Coffee makes the Coffee Pixels bars in a production facility just outside Riga. Given cocoa butter is the main ingredient, Coffee Pixels is similar to chocolate, says Vaitekuns. They don't call it chocolate, partly because the price point may seem too high for such a small piece if people think it is comparable to a chocolate bar (on the company's website, a pack of four bars is €7.20 before shipping). "Another reason is that it contains caffeine like coffee does, and if we said it was coffee chocolate people might think they could eat too much."
The biggest production challenge, says Vaitekuns, is getting the coffee flavour just right. They work with a roastery in Copenhagen called The Coffee Collective and use beans from Ethiopia. Roasting coffee for eating, says Vaitekuns is not the same as roasting to make a hot drink. When you're roasting coffee to drink, he explains, you're not only roasting for flavour but also to make the coffee more soluble in water. "If it's roasted too light, not all the parts - there are some acids, some sugars - not everything can dissolve in the water." When you're roasting coffee to eat, however, this isn't an issue: as you're eating the whole bean, you can roast it lighter.
I came across Coffee Pixels while visiting the TechChill conference in Riga, where a member of the local tech scene offered me the cascara version to try. It looks like a tiny chocolate bar but tastes very much of coffee. The bitterness initially made me recoil in surprise, but I'd soon finished the whole thing. It might have been a result of the marketing (the cascara bar comes emblazoned with the slogan "mind boostin' coffee bar"), but I did feel afterwards as though I'd had my morning fix. The cascara bar contains 50mg of caffeine, which is at the lower end of what you could expect from a single espresso (the actual amount varies a lot, depending on vendor). The milk Coffee Pixels bar contains 33mg of caffeine.
Vaitekuns claims that the caffeine in Coffee Pixels works a bit differently to a regular coffee as it is absorbed differently. "With the fat that's in Coffee Pixels, the cocoa butter, it takes longer to be absorbed in your body," he says. "You can start feeling it some 40-60 minutes after having your bar but then it lasts for four hours."
John White, a professor of pharmacotherapy at Washington State University who has studied caffeine absorption, says that he is not aware of any studies on the effect of adding fat to coffee but that it could conceivably slow the absorption rate of caffeine.
This is the same idea behind the "bulletproof coffee" trend, where people drink coffee with butter or other fats. Vaitekuns says that all three Solid Coffee founders start their day with bulletproof coffee - they are interested in the idea of biohacking and see Coffee Pixels as fitting into that lifestyle. They are careful about their nutrition, practice intermittent fasting, and enjoy cycling and wild camping.
But, they say, Coffee Pixels could also appeal to people for many different reasons. A solid bar could simply be more convenient than a hot drink, for example when driving or on the move. Vaitekuns says online buyers are generally young professionals who are conscious of their nutrition and the environment, and that half of online orders come from the US. He was surprised, however, to see how popular Coffee Pixels was in petrol stations. "We suppose people choose Coffee Pixels just because it's a mobile way of having coffee," he says. "You can buy four bars and leave them in your car as a backup for when you want your coffee but it's not there."
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Solid Coffee currently produces around 10,000 bars a month, with a maximum capacity of 40,000. The company initially raised funding from an angel investor, Jurgis Sedlenieks, who later took on the role of CEO. The team is now looking for a €1 million funding round to increase capacity and expand into other European countries, the US and Japan.
They also want to bring out some new Coffee Pixels products, and have their eye on one particular variant for the US west coast: a coffee bar with cannabis. (The Solid Coffee team, says Vaitekuns, are supporters of the movement to legalise cannabis.) Other potential future products include new flavours, a child-friendly Coffee Pixels bar with less caffeine, a sugar-free option and a vegan version of the milk-flavoured bar.
Vaitekuns says that the team would never want to take the ritual of coffee away from people. Rather, he sees Coffee Pixels as an alternative for when a specialty coffee shop is hard to find. Instead of grabbing a Starbucks, you could carry your caffeine hit in your pocket: "We would suggest to have your high-quality coffee when you can and, when you cannot have high quality coffee, go for a high-quality coffee bar."
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
