Coffee with a conscience

• “We’re not anti-coffee,” Jake Berber, Co-founder & CEO of 500-backed foodtech startup Prefer shared, referring to their coffee product upcycled from leftover bread, soy pulp, and spent grain like barley.
• Coffee is just the first of a portfolio of food and beverages that the team aims to produce in a more sustainable way, by using fermentation rather than traditional agriculture.
• Jake and Co-founder & CTO DJ Tan met at a startup accelerator where 50 budding entrepreneurs got to know each other in a speed date format. They found that they shared a lot of similar values and beliefs about what the future will look like.
• Why coffee? “We have a stronger familiarity with coffee flavors with the very strong coffee culture here in Southeast Asia. And we figured, hey, why not try coffee first? Cacao, chocolate are on our to-do list,” DJ explained.
• To get a healthy supply of leftovers and spent ingredients, Prefer pays companies a token to compensate them for the time and energy put in to collect and deliver them.
• “We think it’s a very fair arrangement [and] a mutually beneficial situation where we can help them manage food waste and also turn that into a high value ingredient such as coffee,” DJ shared.
• By upcycling food, Prefer ensures that they are not reliant on ingredients that are potentially decreasing.
• Jake revealed that the team’s next step is building up their manufacturing capacity in Singapore to serve larger volume purchasers.
• Listen to the full interview on Channel News Asia.