Finland may be the happiest country in the world, but it also has another superlative to brag about: it’s the the largest coffee consumer in the worldwith its population of 5.6 million grinding and brewing the equivalent of 12 kilograms, or about 1,560 cups of coffee, per capita per year, according to the International Coffee Organization.
With a coffee market that should generate $487.5 million in revenue in 2024, according to Statista, roasters across the country have turned to creative solutions to meet the high demand. These innovations include using AI to generate coffee blends, an experiment Kaffa Roastery, based in Helsinki undertaken this week.
The roaster, the country’s third largest, has teamed up with Elev, a Finnish AI consulting startup, to create “AI-conic”, the roaster’s first blend generated by large language models (LLM).
The roastery staff asked ChatGPT and Copilot for a series of tasting notes and asked which beans would produce that flavor profile. Experimenting with LLMs resulted in a mixture of four different grains – an unconventional approach, but one that surprisingly worked. Kaffa staff made no changes to AI’s suggestions.
“This (trial) was the first step to see how AI could help us in the future,” Svante Hampf, managing director and founder of Kaffa. told AP. “I think AI has a lot to offer us in the long term. We are particularly impressed with the coffee taste descriptions created.
Finland has a a strong coffee culture partly because of its location north of the Arctic Circle, which produces long days– sometimes with 19 hours of sunlight – which require a constant flow of caffeine. Some Finns drink up to eight cups a day. Finnish cafes aren’t just places where locals can have coffee; they are also the epicenter of family-led child carecementing coffee as a focal point of Finnish culture.
But despite Kaffa’s dive into coffee experimentation, the AI-generated beverage craze is not native to this Nordic country. Coca-Cola spear Y3000 in September, a drink with flavors suggested by AI and supposed to resemble “what a Coke of the future might taste like”. Columbus-based brewery species X added two beers to its February menu that relies on unconventional flavor combinations created with the help of AI: think pineapple, strawberry and subtly sweet lactose.
The cutting edge of coffee technology
The Finnish coffee industry has been adopting original technologies for years. The MTB Technical Research Center of Finland has found a way to growing coffee beans in a laboratory essentially soaking the cells in a liquid containing the enzymes and nutrients needed for their growth.
Indeed, climate change has made harder to grow coffee on farms, as the heat in areas growing the industry’s most widespread Arabica grain has become inhospitable to the plant. Other bean varieties such as Robusta can grow in a wider range of climates, but taste bland compared to their counterparts. The industry also struggles with soil contamination, deforestation and the use of chemical treatments, which are all problems. impact on coffee bean harvests.
But even though coffee bean farms can only generate a few harvests per year – and are also limited by labor-intensive processing harvest – scientists can produce lab-generated beans in about a month. Yet the proliferation of technology to grow coffee in the lab doesn’t mean these beans are ready to reach the mass market.
“Although roasted cellular coffee samples have several odor compounds in common with conventionally prepared coffees, the full aroma and flavor profile of cellular coffee samples requires additional effort to closely resemble conventional coffee,” Heiko Rischer, head of plant biotechnology at VTT. , and his colleagues wrote in a 2023 Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry study.
Lab-grown coffee may not be as flavorful as its farm-grown alternatives, but roasters and distributors have embraced the idea of using the beans in the future, should climate change require it .
“I think one day we will go down this path because of the disappearance of all natural sources of coffee, so we have to move forward… If the taste is good and the aroma is coffee-based, then why not? I think it’s possible,” a Helsinki-based barista said Reuters.
