- So why would a new Chicago roaster base its marketing on implications that its competitors' naturally processed coffee is dirty?
"But it is," says Matt Matros, co-founder and brand director of Limitless Coffee. "I've been to the farms. I saw it."
Matros explains that in 2015, while he was on a yoga retreat in Bali, he took a tour of a coffee farm.
"And I'm thinking, 'Wow that is filthy.' I couldn't believe how dirty the coffee (harvesting) process is," he says.
Specifically, Matros was horrified by the "natural" processing, which allows coffee cherries to dry under the sun for weeks.
"They're fermenting and decomposing and dying and attracting bugs, birds and wild animals," he says. "I saw this with my own eyes. And then it might rain, and then the sun comes out, and you get mold."
Oh boy.
Entitled bullshit origin story: ✓
- Matros explains that in 2015, while he was on a yoga retreat in Bali, he took a tour of a coffee farm.
Utter disregard of science: ✓
- "With that clean coffee, we have low toxicity, and I think it's that low toxicity that really drives performance and productivity," says Matros. "We want to help people own the day and really win at productivity."
Bulletproof Coffee in there somewhere: ✓
- Fear of these mycotoxins — warranted or not — has freaked out some coffee drinkers in recent years and driven sales of the Upgraded coffee brand sold by Bulletproof coffee founder Dave Asprey. And that fear motivated Matros.
Although the next snake oil coffee company is Starbucks. It takes some marketing stones to juice coffee cherries, extract sugar from them, name the results after a laxative tree and then charge extra.
- Koelling is a plant evolutionary biologist. She grew up in Oregon, where she spent a lot of time learning the ways of the woods.
“You needed to know what cascara looked like so you didn’t cut a marshmallow roasting stick from it,” Koelling said. “Because you would wind up squatting in the woods instead of enjoying your marshmallow.”
posted 2631 days ago