Mikafi Roasting Platform

Description

This roasting platform democratizes the cycle of coffee roasting by connecting farmers, local businesses and nature by technology. This digital service ecosystem contains a fully automated IoT roasting machine, a coffee management platform as well as a physical and digital coffee experience for consumers.

Enjoying a cup of coffee involves many events. A farmer collecting green beans on the opposite part of the world, packaging them in jute bags. Sequentially, these beans are delivered to many continents, to be roasted and again packed in factories. Eventually, we buy this small package of coffee, which has traveled many hours, gone through many boundaries to be enjoyed by us.

Mikafi enables coffee selling businesses to buy green beans from farms, roast on spot fresh coffee and learn from their community. This is how we connect the coffee ecosystem in a digital service, increase their profitability, enable personalization and guarantee sustainability from farm to cup.

Detailed explanation of the submitted project or idea.

The idea of decentralizing and democratizing the process of coffee roasting was born on a coffee farm in Columbia in 2015, and further elaborated in the master thesis of Marius Disler. With the support of the Gebert Rüf Stiftung first concepts and prototypes of a digital connected roastery based on electricity as well as the business case to enable coffee businesses to roast onsite were proven.

With further research activities in collaboration with various universities as well as a swiss government research grant, concepts of personalizing coffee by roasting were developed. Together with our IoT roasting machine, software and cloud services we are now connecting the tech dots and data science into one digital roasting platform.

Nowadays, coffee selling businesses are dependent on today’s roasters mainly roasting with gas. With stale coffee, limited choice, not nearly enough information on flavor, transparency or roasting style they can not meet the constantly growing consumers expectations.

Today’s coffee roasters harm nature. Because of used gas for heating and long transportation distances between supply chain intermediaries. Roasting bigger quantities of coffee with electricity is not possible because big coffee roasting machines solely use gas. Exchanging gas with electricity does not bring any financial value for today’s roasting companies.

Mikafi aims to activate the circular coffee economy and increase the relationship between coffee selling businesses and their community. In this way, we shift the process of roasting into the coffee selling locations and provide the most sustainable, fresh & personalized coffee experience.

We digitalize and democratize the process of coffee roasting with a convenient service. To increase sustainability along the value chain and set a new quality coffee experience for the consumer by merging the sensory and digital coffee experience.

Our vision is to decentralize the coffee process and enable every coffee serving company to roast and sell their own sustainable coffee on the spot without the need of expertise. Hospitality companies as restaurants, coffee shops and hotels as well as other businesses should be able to serve the freshest and individualized coffee as possible to their guests.

Mikafi’s roasting infrastructure enables these businesses to buy green coffee from importers, create coffee roasting profiles and apply it with one click to a fleet of IoT coffee roasting machines in different locations. So they can sell fresh roasted coffee to their consumers onsite and online as well as learn from their taste preferences through an exciting digital experience.

Now it’s the time to gather the developed technology and build a roasting platform to enable coffee businesses to buy green beans directly from farms, roast coffee without expertise in their stores reducing up to 98% of CO2 compared to state-of-the-art solutions and sell fresh coffee based on their consumers taste preferences online.

The timing could not be better: The global demand for quality coffee has never been bigger. Increasing consumer expectations regarding taste, freshness and transparency prove the urge to launch a sustainable decentralized coffee roastery.

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