Swiss retail giant Migros announced it is launching its own coffee making system intended to replace single-use coffee pods.
Migros’ CoffeeB Coffee Balls were five years in the making and will be first available in Switzerland and France. Since the product is designed to replace single-serve plastic coffee pods, the coffee balls are encased in a thin protective layer. However, this layer doesn’t dissolve during the brewing process, but it is fully compostable in about four weeks and will decompose in most home composting systems.
The compostable layer that encapsulates the coffee balls is made from a seaweed-derived material that is both tasteless and colourless, according to the company.
CoffeeB is not the first company to adopt seaweed and algae packaging as a solution to single-use waste problems. In 2017, Skipping Rocks Lab debuted the Ooho water pod—an algal membrane-coated sphere delivery mechanism to replace bottled water. The 2019 London marathoners were treated to the pods.
“We believe that our no-capsule system is the future of portioned coffee and that regular aluminum and plastic capsule systems will be phased out over time,” Frank Wilde, head of CoffeeB and former Nespresso executive told Daily Coffee News.
“The reason is simple: CoffeeB solves the capsule waste problem, and tastes just as good as traditional capsule coffee. The transition will however take time and, similar to the trend towards electric cars, a radical change won’t happen overnight,” Wilde says.
The CoffeeB Coffee Balls do require their own machine: The Globe. The system can brew one 5.3- to 5.9-gram ball of pure ground coffee, which is roasted by Swiss brand Café Royal.
“The Coffee Balls are only compatible with the Coffee B Globe machine since we had to develop a completely new brewing technology,” Caroline Siefarth, who led the company’s research and development process for CoffeeB, told Daily Coffee News. “It is a completely different system to existing coffee capsules.”
The Globe machine is made from recycled materials and features a modular design to allow for parts replacement, unlike many conventional machines.
