“When I held it in my hand, I said, ‘This is it.’ It just felt right. It felt magical,” Caroline Siefarth says of CoffeeB, the truffle-like matte brown sphere she spent five years developing after Swiss food and beverage company Delica tasked her with creating the seemingly impossible: a new coffee capsule with virtually no capsule at all, the first in the world that would leave no waste. At first, she says, “it felt like a mission to Mars because it was so completely new.”
CoffeeB is the answer to the ongoing criticism surrounding the environmental impact of coffee pods. While other brands have been trying to introduce biodegradable versions, they still contain bioplastics and paper that in real life can take many months and even years to decompose. To avoid using any of those materials, Siefarth and her team devised a coating that uses alginate, a polymer derived usually from seaweed, combined with other components to form a stable, flavorless, and heat-resistant natural oxygen barrier. It prevents roasted coffee from losing its flavor, yet disappears after you throw it away. “It completely biodegrades in weeks by just putting the used balls in regular soil,” Siefarth says. During the development and testing phase, she says that she composted the spheres right in her own garden. Because CoffeeB doesn’t use any kind of plastic or aluminum, it greatly reduces the CO2 emissions that these materials come with.
The other big challenge, however, was one of her own making: the spherical shape. It was a design choice that didn’t serve any other purpose than aesthetics—and to set it apart from the competition. Siefarth, who has been working at Delica since 2014 and holds a PhD in food chemistry, specializing in odor and flavor research, acknowledges that although a sphere is a mathematically perfect shape, it is not good for extracting coffee. There’s a reason why every other machine in the world uses a cylinder of sorts: It provides a perfect bed for the water to run through. She knew this, but when she got to feel the magic ball, she couldn’t get back to the cylinder.
This meant that the R&D team had to design a whole new brewing technology, which became another feat on its own. This patented brewing unit was designed first to make the sphere malleable again—changing it into a cylindrical shape—and then extracting the coffee out of it. The balls—which sell for $3.85 for a pack of nine—can only be used with this exclusive system, which retails for about $180 as the CoffeeB Globe machine.
The magic-ball gamble paid off. While the company won’t disclose sales numbers, it says that the reception in Switzerland and France since its September 2022 launch was strong enough that in April 2023 it expanded to Germany—Europe’s biggest coffee-pod market. Other countries are to follow. The key to its success, according to Delica’s focus groups, is a combination of the attractive shape and reduction in CO2 production (by halving the amount of coffee per cup and getting rid of needless pod waste). “People seem to feel better knowing this,” Siefarth says. People may vary on how they take their coffee, but everyone wants it with a clear conscience.
This story is part of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business for 2023. Discover the full list of groundbreakers who’ve achieved something meaningful in the past year.
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the early-rate deadline, May 3.