A brewtiful drink

• Humans have been fermenting food and drinks for ages to create some familiar favorites — yogurt, kimchi, beer, and kombucha. 500-backed foodtech startup Prefer added coffee to this list.
• “Fermentation is a way to create flavors that don’t exist,” shared Co-founder & CTO Ding Jie (DJ) Tan. “From my previous work, I had an inkling of what might work,” the food scientist explained, but narrowing it down to the exact proportions, processes, and types of leftovers took a while.
• Chicory root is used as a coffee substitute, and while it is reminiscent of coffee, the taste wasn’t close enough for the team. Grinding date seeds yielded more of a fruity tea-like drink.
• What showed promise was using mixtures of leftover food. But it’s not just a taste test. The team used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), a technique that identifies individual molecular compounds in mixtures, to identify and analyze the molecules that create the desired taste.
• After a few months and several hundred different mixes and methods, they zeroed in on the right combination: stale bread from bakeries, soybean pulp from tofu making, and spent barley grains from local breweries.
• Currently, Prefer’s brew is only available in Singapore, but the team hopes to expand to other places while still upcycling local food waste. In the Philippines, for example, leftover cassava, sugarcane, or pineapple might be used.
• “Our technology doesn’t rely on soy, bread, and barley but tries to use whatever is available,” DJ added.
• Read the full interview on MIT Technology Review.