Gluten-Free Coffee Flour Can Help Clean Up The Environment

Coffee Flour, formulated by Dan Belliveau, might be the latest solution to not only improve on gluten-free products but also to help the environment.

Long before coffee beans make their way into our coffee cups, they are harvested, fermented, and dried. During the coffee-making process, the remaining pulp of the coffee cherry is discarded and left to build up and decay in fields and rivers, according to the company website.

Belliveau, a former executive of Starbucks and former owner of a coffee and wine supply chain firm, is using his patent-pending process in an effort to recycle the coffee byproduct by collecting coffee cherries and converting them into gluten-free flour, Beverage Daily reported. The cherries are collected from locations such as Nicaragua, Guatemala, Vietnam, El Salvador, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Mexico.

"We've been working with mills around the world since 2013, when we produced 150,000 pounds of dried pulp to mill into coffee flour to establish production supply that meets our quality standards, with different mills scaling up at different rates," Coffee Flour's vice president of marketing, Carole Widmayer, told Beverage Daily.

The nutrient-rich, gluten-free flour has been used as a replacement for flour in baked goods at Sprout's, a natural grocery store chain in the U.S., and cafés in the U.S. and London.