Goodbye, coffee! The recipe of the classic morning liqueur is changing radically. The new components announced by scientists

Global coffee consumption is huge, with two billion cups drunk daily. This dependence comes at a high price: massive deforestation, low wages for farmers and significant carbon emissions. As climate change threatens traditional coffee production, synthetic coffee is emerging.

Research suggests that around half of the land most suitable for growing coffee will become unsuitable for this purpose by 2050 due to climate change. In Brazil, this figure reaches 88%.

Big companies are using biotechnology and food science to create alternatives to regular coffee, using ingredients ranging from chickpeas to recycled agricultural waste, including date kernels, according to The Wall Street Journal, cited by Mediafax.

Other approaches use lab-grown cells from real coffee plants.

One of the world’s largest food companies, Cargill, recently signed an agreement to become the exclusive business-to-business distributor of cocoa-free and nut-free products from bean-free coffee maker Voyage Foods.

If these companies reach enough people, it will be a classic case of what economists and climate capitalists call the “substitution effect”: As traditional coffee becomes rarer and more expensive, consumers will switch to cheaper alternatives. cheap and more.

And coffee could be just the beginning. Voyage Foods already sells a nut-free and cocoa-free Nutella alternative. The company says its product is comparable in price to “real” Nutella.

For people to switch from the brands they know, the switch has to cost them nothing, and the replacement has to taste good, says chief executive Adam Maxwell.

“A green coffee bean doesn’t taste anything like a cup of coffee that we drink and enjoy,” he says. “The experience we have of coffee or chocolate is really determined by the process used to produce them”.