Coffee Flour Review

Coffee Flour is a gluten-free flour product that uses the pulp of coffee cherries and is high in protein. Here’s our Coffee Flour review.

What is Coffee Flour?

Coffee Flour is a new gluten-free flour product made by a Seattle startup company. As the name suggests, the flour is made from the pulp of coffee cherries. It has one unique advantage compared to other gluten-free flours: it’s high in protein.

Yes, this flour is made from coffee cherries, which are significantly different from coffee beans. You’re not going to get a buzz by eating this flour.

The flour is made by taking the dried pulp of the coffee cherry. The coffee cherry is the part that covers the bean. Then, the dried pulp is ground down to form a flour.

The company that makes Coffee Flour insists that the flour doesn’t actually taste like coffee – which is a good thing if you ever want to bake with it.

It’s also not technically even a flour: instead, it’s a food-grade powder.

The makers of Coffee Flour also claim that there is some caffeine in coffee flour. However, a typical serving of a Coffee Flour baked product (like a slice of sandwich bread) would contain the caffeine equivalent of one eighth of a cup of brewed coffee – so unless you’re eating a lot of baked goods per day, you should be safe and (mostly) stimulant-free.

Advantages of Coffee Flour

Coffee Flour comes with some unique advantages compared to other gluten-free flours. Those advantages include:

— It contains a mildly citrusy flavor with floral notes (it doesn’t have any coffee taste, according to the manufacturer)

— It’s high in fiber (claims to have 5 times more fiber than wheat flour)

— It’s low in fat (claims to have less fat than gluten-free options like coconut flour)

— It contains about one eighth of a cup of coffee’s worth of caffeine in each serving of a Coffee Flour baked good, which can be a good or bad thing depending on your coffee addiction

— It’s high in protein (contains 3 times more protein than kale)

— Rich with antioxidants (contains 38% more antioxidants per gram than a pomegranate)

— High in vitamins like potassium and iron (twice as much potassium as bananas and 3 times as much iron as fresh spinach)

All of these stats come from the official Coffee Flour website.

Coffee Flour Is Made from Material that Normally Gets Discarded

One of the reasons why people are getting excited about Coffee Flour is that it’s environmentally-friendly: normally, the cherry pulp that comes from harvesting coffee beans just gets discarded. By using this pulp to make a product, the creators of Coffee Flour claim to make something that is sustainable and environmentally-friendly in coffee-growing countries around the world.

Here’s how the company describes it:

“Each year the billions of coffee beans that eventually make their way into the Americanos, lattes, and no-foam, extra-hot, triple-shot cappuccinos of the world are harvested by milling and extracting them from the coffee plant. The surrounding fruit, is discarded. It often gets dumped into rivers or left to rot in heaps. So we invented something better to do with it. Something that’s better for everyone.”

By harvesting this material and using it, the creators of Coffee Flour claim that they’ll avoid putting botanical waste into streams and soil while also helping grow the economies of some of the poorer regions of the planet.

Coffee Flour Ingredients

Coffee Flour has the following nutritional profile:

How to Buy Coffee Flour

Coffee Flour is currently in active production and is available in a very limited number of places around the world.

The flour is in production in Hawaii, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, and Vietnam.

There’s also working Coffee Flour available to chefs and restaurants – it’s just not available for general sale. One recent article about Coffee Flour on Vice introduced a New York City chef to coffee flour. Here’s what that article had to say about the gluten-free flour:

“It’s very potent,” Meier observes when mixing the CoffeeFlour into cookie dough. “And it’s quite grainy and harsh. But there’s also a real sweetness and depth to it.”

That article also mentions that Coffee Flour is preparing to be added to granola, cookies, and brownie products in the future.

In fact, Coffee Flour is fully operational in Nicaragua, and the country’s Casa del Café chain of coffee shops now serves CoffeeFlour-based muffins and cookies.

Other cafes currently serving Coffee Flour-based goods include Google’s Mountain View, California café. You can view all locations where Coffee Flour (or its products) are currently being sold using this map: CoffeeFlour.com/map/

Instead of calling itself a “product for sale”, the company is currently labeling itself as a social movement. The company’s Twitter page, for example, describes the company as follows:

“Coffee Flour™ is a social impact movement inspired by the discovery of billions of pounds of nutrition and the creation of new foods to help the planet.”

About Coffee Flour

Coffee Flour was founded by Dan Belliveau. Belliveau is also the company’s CEO. He was the former technical services director for Starbucks. As part of his job with Starbucks, he used to visit the farms that produce coffee. He saw the wasted cherry pulp product firsthand and saw an opportunity.

Ultimately, Coffee Flour is neither a coffee nor a flour, which makes its name a bit confusing. Instead, it’s a good-grade powder that can be added to almost anything to give it texture and consistency. Oh, and the product also wants to try to save the world and the environment at the same time – so there’s a lot going on.

You can stay up to date on the latest Coffee Flour news at the official Coffee Flour website at CoffeeFlour.com

The company is headquartered in Seattle.