Episode 83: Atomo Coffee: Finally, a coffee replacement that won't break your heart

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. 

If you’re listening to this episode just as it dropped well. It’s Earth Month! And for Earth Month I’m going to try to focus these episodes on some ACTIONABLE things that you can do in your own life to make a difference. Last week sort of kicked us off even though it was March thinking about where to put your money that’s a huge one. This week - Welllllllll. I’m not even going to lie, I think a not so tiny part of me has been avoiding the coffee conversation because there are just some things you wish you didn’t know. Like how coffee is a climate and kind of also a humanitarian disaster. But it is  and I’ve been knowing it and I can’t *really* ignore it much longer 

And luckily I think we are finally getting to a point where we have coffee alternatives that are pretty good and don’t have to involve mushrooms. Yours can if you want to but it’s not my thing. Anyway this week we’re talking with a coffee entrepreneur who took me on a journey from the coffee belt to camel stomachs to make a coffee alternative that yes you can buy. Let’s do it. 

Andy Kleitsch

Yeah, I am Andy Kleitsch. I'm the CEO of Atomo Coffee, and we make great tasting coffee without any coffee beans.

Molly Wood

I have a million questions about how that happens, but first I'm gonna need you to take a deep breath everybody. Give us the bad news about coffee and climate.

Andy Kleitsch

There's a lot of bad news, actually. This is a lot. In fact, why don't I start with this? If you drink two cups of coffee a day, then it takes, which you do, all right, great. Well, it takes 20 coffee trees just for you. 20, that's quite a few. We didn't probably know that. All right, so you need 20 coffee trees. Coffee is grown in this belt, the coffee belt.

Molly Wood 

This hurts, yep.

Molly Wood 

Which I do.

Molly Wood 

Uh-uh. Yeah.

Andy Kleitsch 

these tropical locations, and for the last couple hundred years, the playbook has been to deforest the land and grow coffee in these regions. And what's happening now is a series of up farming. Coffee's always moving, and as climate change is making things warmer, coffee is moving further uphill, and it's called up farming.

What has been decided by the scientists as they analyze coffee and coffee is going through a lot of trouble right now, it's kind of a timely time to talk about this, is coffee is at its highest price ever and it's because of drought, frost, fungus, you know, it's all the problems that you're seeing related to climate change right now. And it's been determined that half the coffee will have to move in the next 30 years.

So half of the coffee has to move. Where is it moving? It's moving further uphill. It's moving into forested areas. And so what we're seeing here is what I call it's not a fair trade. We have fair trade coffee. So trading forest for coffee is not a fair trade.

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Andy Kleitsch

But that is the only playbook that the coffee industry has. Imagine this, for the last 200 years they've been getting better and better and better at growing coffee, convincing coffee farmers, the poorest of the poor, to get into coffee farming and to clear the land and grow coffee for us. But that playbook is so detrimental that it's going to be effectively the size of Costa Rica that will have to be deforested over the next 30 years to supply our coffee. Yeah.

Molly Wood 

Wow. So you have this kind of, it sounds like you're describing a pretty bad double whammy situation. It's already way too resource intensive. Like the fact that two cups of coffee takes 20 trees is something I really want to come back to and try to understand. And on top of that, because the growable areas are decreasing as a result of, is it over farming and the effects of climate change? Is it sort of both?

Andy Kleitsch 

Right.

Andy Kleitsch 

It's, well, wow. Well, yeah, think of it, there's so much to talk about with the farming. we've kind of been sold a story that isn't true. Like, we all have the story that coffee farmers are this happy group. And it turns out that 75 % of coffee farmers live in absolute poverty. They are not making even a minimum wage that would be considered livable.

Molly Wood 

Is it mostly climate change?

Molly Wood

Yeah.

Andy Kleitsch

So if you are unfortunate enough to be a coffee farmer, 75 % of them are destined to a life of poverty.

I've been in coffee farms in the Amazon on the edge of where coffee is expanding into the Amazon to witness the first hand like what is going on out there and I can tell you that is it is the poorest of the poor that are trying to forge a life for themselves and now they're getting paid barely anything to grow this coffee. The price of coffee now that it's at an all-time high poses a curious question.

Because if coffee is at an all-time high, coffee farmers might actually get paid more money, which is a good thing for coffee farmers. The unfortunate thing is that it would encourage now more deforestation. It would encourage more people to get into coffee farming. So it is a triple whammy now. There are wrapped all around it. The higher the coffee price goes, the more likely we're going to deforest everything to grow more coffee.

Molly Wood 

Right?

Molly Wood 

I see, wow. There are like unfortunate paradoxes everywhere you look, Uh-huh.

Andy Kleitsch 

unless there was a supply and a demand flip. So if we just said, we're going to stop buying coffee that comes from these deforested areas, we're going stop buying coffee. We want the current coffee farmers to be successful. But please, don't anyone else get into coffee farming. And then we can use upcycled and natural ingredients that are farmed in more efficient ways that don't cause deforestation to get our coffee fix.

Molly Wood

Right, and that is where you come in. Okay, so let's go, let's talk about you for a minute. And before we talk about the product, how did you arrive here with this company and this solution and the idea of a more sustainable alternative to coffee?

Andy Kleitsch 

That's our goal.

Andy Kleitsch 

Yeah, was a journey that started out in software. And I spent 25 years in software development, like doing startups in software. And I kind of had that midlife moment where I realized I had spent my whole life making software for banks and other people that, you know, did they really need more money? And what am I doing with my life? And so instead of buying a Corvette or anything, I just said, I need to do something with my life that's better for the planet. And I don't know what it is. I don't have any good ideas.

and I set out to talk and to do a research project. Really, I went and started interviewing scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and I started asking them the question, you know, what do you wish you were working on right now that you're not working on?

And that's a fascinating question that almost everyone has an answer to that question, by the way, if you ask anyone that. Like, you have a job, but what do you wish you were working on? And when you ask an engineer that, or an inventor, or an entrepreneur, they have some pretty amazing answers. And one of them was a food scientist that said to me, he goes, Andy, I wish I could reverse engineer coffee. Like, I think it's possible.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, huh.

Andy Kleitsch 

And I thought why would you want to reverse engineer coffee? And he said well, I think I could make it perfect. That is not perfect because that's a food scientist for you. All right, a food scientist would say that right like and but for me I'm like I think there's other reasons to reverse engineer coffee and I went and did all the research on coffee and I became a certified coffee roaster and I became a coffee taster, a Q grader and I went down to Peru like I've mentioned and went deep into the coffee territory to understand like where is it grown? How is it grown? What are the problems?

Molly Wood 

Yeah, right.

Andy Kleitsch 

with it and came away with this picture that said this is a very worthwhile endeavor to pursue.

and we can actually make a difference here. If we could reverse engineer coffee and make it taste good, we can actually make a difference in the planet. And so that was six years ago. We started in a garage in Seattle, like all good startups. Right, yeah. Right, because we're in Seattle and in a garage, you get extra points for that. And yeah, that's how we started. yeah, right, exactly. And then our first office was at the Pike Place Market

Molly Wood 

I was just gonna, well, like all good coffee stories. You pretty much had to start in Seattle. Like, sorry.

Yep, just ticking boxes left and right here.

Andy Kleitsch

Seattle because we wanted that lineage as well. So that's where we had our first office.

Molly Wood 

Amazing. OK, so let's talk about the product. you are, it is, it's it's a beanless situation,

Andy Kleitsch 

Yeah.

It is a beetles coffee, which means a few things. We actually spent considerable time engineering the grounds, so we make a ground coffee.

It looks like coffee, smells like coffee, tastes like coffee. You you cannot tell the difference. has, so engineering grounds was actually a big part of the story. as well as coffee is everything. is the aroma, it's the taste, it's that feeling, it's the caffeine, it's the ritual. So really replicating all that. We decided early on that we weren't going to make coffee that didn't enable you to enjoy the ritual of coffee.

So, know, you're free think for a second, if you're gonna remake coffee, you could make it into a pill, you could make it into an eyedropper, you could make it into anything, you know, and we just said, actually, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna make sure that you can use all the same experiences that you use today. So, if you have a filter machine, a drip machine, or a mocha pod, or pods, or whatever, has to work in all of these. So, that was step number one, and it had to have that same experience that you, and the result that you deliver from coffee.

So we have.

Andy Kleitsch 

set out to reverse engineer it and we immediately started looking at hundreds and hundreds of ingredients. Like how can you make coffee? Well, first thing we did is we looked at what's in coffee. And so we took a look at all the compounds that are in a cup of coffee. So we first started with a cup of coffee. We said, what's in this coffee cup? And then we realized to create all the complexity in that coffee cup that we had to go back and recreate the green coffee bean. So what makes coffee so

magical is that it starts with a green coffee bean, like 200 compounds, you roast it. It goes through this roasting experience and it gets to close to a thousand compounds at the end. It's all developed and it's got this complexity and layers to it and it becomes magical. Right? And so we said there's a magical process that happens between a green coffee bean and a roasted coffee bean. What is that? How can we replicate those pathways?

And that is what our scientists have been working on for years and really looking at precursors to the green coffee bean.

What are some of those ingredients? And so we found ingredients like green banana and papaya and guava, fenugreek, fennel, sunflower, and date pits, pits from dates. And this is one of our star ingredients is date pits. imagine if you've had like an RX bar or any kind of power bar that has date paste in it. Well, that date paste, there's a result of, there's a lot of date

Molly Wood 

Huh.

Molly Wood 

Yeah. Yep.

Andy Kleitsch 

pits that are thrown away every day from that date paste and date pits, we pick up about 10,000 pounds a day in Coachella, which are typically thrown away. And so we have the world's largest date pit upcycling center where we, in fact, date pits around the world are just thrown away. In some parts of the world, a camel will eat a date pit. They won't enjoy it, but they will eat it.

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Molly Wood 

What? I have so, now I have so many questions about the camels and the date pits. Like, I'm just derailed. I have just been like, squirrel, wait, what? You've introduced a camel and now we have to go there. It's like Chekhov's rifle.

Andy Kleitsch

They would much rather eat other things. Let's just say that I've been to a camel...

where they produce food for camels on the edge of the Sahara Desert in Tunisia just to understand where are these date pits going. And I've followed date pits all around the world.

And I can tell you, they call them garages, but there are garages and garages and garages of mostly women with a sharp knife sitting in a garage taking dates one by one and cutting them open and taking the pits out. And they're deep hitting dates by hand in Tunisia. And then a lot of those date pits will end up being ground up and somehow being fed to camels. But we're using it for a different purpose.

Molly Wood

Wow. Yeah.

Molly Wood 

I honestly, I love this job so much. Okay, keep going, keep going. So date pits, so date pits you at some point discovered are kind of like the key to the whole thing. This is the.

Andy Kleitsch 

Yeah.

See you.

There are not many camels in the US, so unfortunately our date pits are wasted and they're typically thrown away or burned. So yeah, we had to find a different use for these date pits here. And so we do that. We take them into our facility in Coachella. We dry them, we wash them in California. It is a place. In fact, yeah, we love that it's.

Molly Wood 

in California. People may be familiar with the concert, but it turns out it's a place. Yep.

Andy Kleitsch 

We love that there's a concert there and that there are date pits there. It's a beautiful place to visit, by the way. So we take those date pits in, we wash them, we dry them. We actually granulate them down to make them more the size of a coffee bean. And then we take them up to Seattle, where our roastery is. And in the Seattle roastery, all of our ingredients come in one side. So we have the date pits and, like I mentioned before, these other ingredients, like fenugreek and sunflower and other things that we

Molly Wood 

Right.

Andy Kleitsch 

into our mix. And those go through various work streams in our roastery. And our roastery is a bit like a beer brewing facility, a cracker making facility, a coffee roasting facility. We actually have a coffee roaster here, coffee grinders, you know, what you would expect. But we use many different techniques to, you know, evoke these, this result that we're looking for. And I just wanted to say that we're not bleeping and blooping after

atoms together, we are taking farm grown ingredients, we are taking things from farmers. A lot of people say, what about the farmers when they find out about Beanless Coffee? And we're like, we actually work with more farmers. That's who we work with. We work with farmers. And so we have a clean label that has all these farm grown ingredients on it, and we're reacting to those ingredients. And that's what we do here.

Molly Wood 

So how long, where is the product in terms of in market? I know you have some distribution deals with coffee shops, can people buy it? Like what's the?

Andy Kleitsch 

Mmm.

Andy Kleitsch

Yeah.

So even though we've been at this for six years now, it's hard to imagine. Our factory, the roastery that creates our grounds just came online last year. And so we then launched it first with Bluestone Lane here in the US and made our product available to their 80 cafes. Then we launched in Tokyo with a barista champion in Tokyo at a cafe. And now we're in the UK as well. And we're slowly just kind of expanding our footprint of where

available. We're also available on Amazon where you can buy our product and brew it at home and try it that way as well.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break when we come back I know this SOUNDS like the end of the story but don’t worry we’re talking caffeine in part 2. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool I’m talking with Andy Kleitsch of Atomo Coffee and yeah yeah but do we really drink it for the taste? What about that kick, man? And other product development tales. 

Molly Wood 

What? I mean, I am not actually shocked to hear that it would take six years to approximate or perfect a coffee replacement. what did it how did you know you were there? Did you invite that same scientist?

Andy Kleitsch 

We had several like...

aha moments and I'll just describe two of them that were just total surprises. know, one was when we first created a cold brew and just maybe a year two, every day we would create hot coffee in our lab. One day we created hot coffee, we put it in the refrigerator, we came back the next morning and we're like, oh yeah, we should try that coffee we made yesterday and we took it out of the refrigerator and drank it cold and we were like, what the heck? Like, this is delicious cold. How did we not know this?

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Molly Wood

Huh?

Andy Kleitsch 

It just turns out, it was good time, right. So we created some cold brew. We created 100,000 cans. We sold through them. Everyone loved them. But we realized we just didn't have the factory and the skills to scale that. So that was kind of, you know, surprise one. The next surprise in our development is we were creating all of these pour overs. We thought we're going to create ground coffee, ground coffee. Let's create it as a pour over. And the intern, you know, every day that we would create ground coffee, we would filter the coffee and we would sift the coffee grounds and we would take

Molly Wood 

Good timing too, because cold brew is a thing.

Andy Kleitsch 

the grounds that are too big, we put them in one side and the grounds that are too fine, we put them on the other side. And one day the intern actually took all the fine grounds, put them into our espresso machine at the office and pulled an espresso shot that blew everyone's mind. We couldn't believe it. We were like, what happened? so it just turned out that the closer we got to replicating coffee, the more it started to act like coffee. And those fine grounds were like espresso grounds. They had the crema, it had the cascading effect.

And so we were like, okay, let's go. So that's when we launched with, but imagine this, in that moment, we could only make one pound a day, you know, in our lab. So we really couldn't scale this thing very much. And it took, you know, raising some capital and building a factory. And now we have two facilities. We have the upcycling center in Coachella in California. We have our roastery here in Seattle. And so it's just taken this long to kind of perfect the formula and then be able to scale the manufacturing, which is

Molly Wood 

Yep.

Andy Kleitsch 

It took a year and half for us to figure out how to build this factory, what machines we're going to order, get it all installed, get it certified. It's taken that long to really figure out how to build this at scale. Yeah, and so now we're at the doorstep. Right, yeah, exactly.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, it's this is why this is why people love software going all the way back to your roots like. So how where does the you know, asking for a friend, where does the clutch component the caffeine come from?

Andy Kleitsch

Mmm. Yeah, this is number one question. Number one question is

Molly Wood 

Exactly. I'm like, even if it tastes the same, it needs to do the one job.

Andy Kleitsch 

Right, exactly. does. Yeah. So when we first started the company, said, how do we get caffeine? Right. where, you know, and it turns out there are a couple of different ways you can get it. And there are actually 60 different plants that produce caffeine. Yeah. And so we kind of set out to be like, oh, right, there's tea. Exactly. Yeah. So we first we set out like, could we find

Molly Wood

I guess I should have realized that because there's tea in the world.

Andy Kleitsch 

a caffeine source that is, you

taste good, that's natural. And it turns out that we started looking into green tea and if you've ever had a decaffeinated green tea, well the caffeine goes somewhere. And it turns out that's where it goes to us. So we are getting caffeine from a decaffeinated green tea right now as our source and we like it. We think it provides a, and actually it provides a slightly different buzz. And what we've been able, this is our theory, okay, so we don't, I can't tell you that we've proven this yet, but our

is that your body absorbs caffeine from green tea at a slower rate. And so what you get is when you're drinking coffee, it's like a rocket ship, right? You can have this extreme quick up and then it can crash. And green tea, people will typically say, I don't feel that with green tea. I don't have the rush that goes up and I don't have the crash that comes down. So we think your body absorbs it more slowly. So when we blend Atomo with coffee, like a 50-50 blend, you're getting this blended caffeine experience, which you know gives you a little bit of that rush from the coffee but then lets you down more slowly.

Molly Wood 

Yeah. You brought up the blending, which I want to ask you about. you know, going to market, of course, is a complicated process. It sounds like initially we're going to go to market with a pure replacement. And now you're blending. How did that come about?

Andy Kleitsch 

Yeah, call it, internally we call it like pure atomo or uncut atomo. We have some funny names for it, right? Yeah. And we realized early on, we thought that that was going to be the way to go to market, was to have this uncut pure product.

Molly Wood

Nice.

Andy Kleitsch 

And what we realized was it actually didn't invite the rest of the industry to participate with us. And knowing that it's going to take a village here. It's going to take all of us working together to make an impact on the planet. And so we can't have the biggest coffee players in the world not involved in beanless coffee. We all need to be involved in it. And so we realized that we should start blending this and try to

if we could create a world together and see if we could enable the biggest coffee brands in the world to be more sustainable. it kind of, this was the third accident, if you will. We were in a big grocery chain, really famous grocery chain. We're there meeting with their coffee buyers and we just decided on a whim so that we would blend half of their coffee with our coffee and just give it to them and see how they liked it. And right there, we said, we're gonna make,

Molly Wood 

Like literally just pour it in together. Yeah.

Andy Kleitsch 

shot of espresso, but we're going to take half of your espresso and put half of our espresso in there and just see how this goes." And they tried it and they were like, we think we like this better than our espresso by itself. Like we think we like this blend better. And now I have gone around the world now and shared this with, you know, the

Molly Wood

Huh.

Andy Kleitsch 

the leading coffee brands in Germany, in Italy, in the UK, in Japan. We've gone around the world sharing this coffee with the biggest coffee brands out there. And their R &D teams will take our coffee and take their coffee, blend it together, and pull a shot. all of them, first of all, they do.

they have this epiphany where they're like, what just happened? I have to rethink my life right now because I thought coffee was, because this worked, right? Exactly, yeah, they're like, my god, first they say no one would ever know. And then they're like, then they sit back and look like, now I gotta rethink my life because I thought coffee just came from coffee and now it could come from.

Molly Wood 

Because this worked. Yeah.

Andy Kleitsch 

coffee and what does that mean for us? And I think collectively if you had to look at the coffee industry as a whole they're really just starting to think to themselves what does this mean for us?

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Andy Kleitsch

And in a way, it actually is liberating. It gives them permission now. And one thing we're going to see is as consumers vote with their taste, first of all, they'll say, drinking beanless coffee tastes good. And it gives me the result. So once coffee companies can see that they have permission to blend with things that are not coffee, I think we're going to see an explosion of innovation, frankly. We're going to see new flavors, new experiences.

each one of these should be better for the planet and better for consumers and frankly less expensive for consumers because right now where coffee is going it is we're starting to see coffee consumption decline because of the cost of coffee. Yeah and so let's not let's make coffee affordable right let's keep it affordable.

Molly Wood 

And will, with acknowledgement that any product that is very early in its life is not gonna be necessarily cheaper than the competition. But do you envision that you're making a product that can be and will be? Or even is, it already is.

Andy Kleitsch 

It's happened now. It just happened. Drop the mic. It just happened. So coffee is at an all-time high. So the price of coffee doubled in the last four months. So we are seeing a point now where our coffee, beanless coffee, is less expensive than conventional coffee. It can provide a substantial savings for coffee companies.

Molly Wood 

Right. Right.

Andy Kleitsch 

And so now it's really, the kind of companies that we're talking to right now are the ones that do a lot of blending. It's really interesting. I could just maybe point something out really quickly, like the hipster coffee brands.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, please.

Andy Kleitsch 

they're actually purists, right? If you think about it, they're almost old school purists. Coffee has to be this way and I have to grind it like this. But if you look at kind of what I would say the larger coffee companies that are doing things that you might say not as pure. They're offering a latte in a can that has vanilla latte with this and that. And you're like, it has an ingredient label that you're not sure what's on that ingredient label.

Molly Wood 

Right. It's coffee adjacent, I like to say.

Andy Kleitsch 

Right exactly, but how popular is that stuff? Let me tell you who's drinking Who has a pumpkin spice latte, you know in October, you know Like a lot of people and who's drinking a vanilla pod or a capsule a lot of people so Like this part of the industry is massive and I think what we're gonna find is that that part of the industry is going to be the first to embrace Beanless coffee and coffee alternatives because why not if it can deliver it? It's just the base right deliver the same experience

Molly Wood

Why not? It's just the base.

Andy Kleitsch

And so, yeah, I think that's where we're gonna see. So in a weird twist of fate, we're gonna see the largest companies that might not be known for their sustainable practices could be the ones that actually adopt the most sustainable coffee faster than the hipsters who you would assume would be the most sustainable, but because they're purists, they're trapped.

Molly Wood 

Right, right. And they're trapped in what is, to your point, a dying cycle. It sounds like something that genuinely is not sustainable, by which I mean, not only does it do damage to the planet, it just can't last. Interesting.

Andy Kleitsch 

Mmm, I just...

Andy Kleitsch 

Yeah, absolutely does. It is the most damage causing way to drink coffee.

Molly Wood 

Well, it is really interesting, right? Because this is in some ways a story of progress that occasionally has to involve compromise. You had to take a pure play product that would be unquestionably more sustainable and blend it with its less sustainable counterpart to get to acceptance.

Andy Kleitsch 

home.

Molly Wood 

But I feel like that is like the story of change, right? It's that you wanna say that at the end of the day without adoption, no change happens.

Andy Kleitsch 

Yeah. And to bring everyone along. That's the thing. Right. Yeah.

Molly Wood

Right, and to bring everyone along. Yeah, because one, you have to get consumers to be like, I will drink a coffee alternative, which is tough. Two, you have to get coffee companies to buy this product. And it sounds like that is the part that people lock into. People lock into their dying methods, it turns out. They want to hold onto that.

Andy Kleitsch 

Try it.

Andy Kleitsch 

Yeah, well, it does. What I say is the coffee industry didn't wake up every day and say, I want to disrupt myself. They just don't wake up and say that.

And here's something else that I found interesting now that I'm you technology background got into coffee And then I thought I just assumed every coffee company probably has Scientists and they're innovating and it just turns out that's not true There are only a couple coffee companies in the world that have science departments like because most coffee is the innovation is a Pumpkin spice latte like that's the innovation

Molly Wood 

Yeah. Well, they did make it cold now. So it's pretty big deal.

Andy Kleitsch

You know, so, right, Or like, remember like the biggest one that Starbucks did a while ago was like olive oil. We're gonna put olive oil in your coffee, you know? so like those are the, that's considered innovation.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, f***.

Andy Kleitsch 

I get it, but they're not really looking at like how do I, can I just tell you something? I realized this, there are problems that you're looking for solutions for, like you as a person right now, you have problems in your life and you're like there are problems that you're looking for solutions for and there are problems you have that you're just assuming you're gonna have to deal with for the rest of your life, right? And for a coffee company, they always assumed that the coffee tree and coffee growers and coffee was a problem they were gonna have to deal with for the rest of their lives. They didn't think there was a way to get around.

Molly Wood 

Right, right.

Andy Kleitsch

that. And so now when we come to them with a solution, they're seriously going like, I didn't know this was this is a problem I have. I didn't know there was going to be a solution for this. And so now they have to figure out how to fit it into their lives.

Molly Wood 

Right, they're shook.

So I guess that always raises to me, whenever there's a new feedstock in play, the question sort of become like they didn't, coffee makers didn't set out to say, we're gonna deforest and this coffee, we're gonna need 20 trays to make two cups of coffee. You're saying we've got date pits and all these other ingredients that we can use to make this alternative. At what point does that, as you scale, do you run into a problem of supply?

Andy Kleitsch 

I mean it's gonna take billions of cups first of all to hit that threshold with day pits but one of the things that Right exactly full date they're gonna be so much happier when they eat something else by the way like they are They don't know they don't you can tell on their face they just don't like it Right exactly not happy

Molly Wood

Will you be starving camels is what I need to do. You're like, let me be clear. They do not like it. It's like when my dogs get kibble with no topper, not happy.

Andy Kleitsch

By the way, these day pits are so hard you can we When we first started out trying to break them up, we would break all the blades we would you know Like they they are that hard. They're harder than rocks so Now that you got me thinking about camels

Molly Wood

So yes, I'm sorry, I totally derailed you. This is the problem with introducing camels. Okay, yes. How long is it before you have a problem with supply?

Andy Kleitsch 

Okay.

So we were, one of the leading coffee companies in the world had us out to their R &D Innovation Center. We're talking to their R &D team about what we do and the ingredients we use. And they actually had such a compelling idea. said, Andy, we want to create a zero kilometer coffee. We want to take ingredients that are right here in our country, right here, and use those. Can you guys help us formulate and use those ingredients? And so just think of, like around the world, like if you were in Japan, you might be thinking about cherry blossoms.

or cherry pits or something. you're in Italy, you might be thinking about olive pits. you're in other, there are peach pits. If you're from Georgia, there are so many different kind of byproducts and products we could upcycle in different parts of the world that we know could contribute to parts of this formula. yeah. So I would love, right.

Molly Wood

Yeah.

Molly Wood 

I love that. So there could really be local solutions, like worst case, yeah, it's my favorite.

Andy Kleitsch 

Yeah, a locally grown, locally upcycled product that might even have its own special kind of flavor profile because it's from that region. But when you're talking about like any blend makes a difference. So if we're even blending 10 % or blending 20 % or blending 30%, like we know there are ways for us to create blends that are indistinguishable, that can help offset the need to tear down further forest, that can get you that same buzz and that same feeling.

So we know that it's possible.

Molly Wood 

Yep. How do we, so what comes next? How do we kind of get the word out to consumers? What's the kind of ideal, you know, two to five year scenario here and does it rhyme with schmarr-blucks?

Andy Kleitsch 

My opinion on that one is changing daily. We get inbound calls every week, and those inbound calls are coming from what I would consider the true innovators, like the people that are actually pushing the boundary on coffee today.

Molly Wood 

Flar Stucks.

Andy Kleitsch 

They are people that are taking new, innovative ideas and putting them together with coffee. And I would call them the blenders, the unconventional, non-traditionalist blenders. And so I would say that what we're going to see is that just creating something very tasty and accessible is going to be probably where we get the most traction initially. We created a dirty chai.

beanless, where we took some chai spices, we took our beanless coffee, we blended it together, put it in a pod, pulled it out and said, this is delicious. This is a dirty atomo. And we like, we set out to replicate coffee. And here's the problem. When you replicate something too well, there was no, like if we have our coffee and next to conventional coffee and they taste too similar, for a consumer,

You're almost like, hmm, why would I pick Atomo? It's so close to coffee, there's no differentiation. It almost provides, like there's not enough incentive. Sure it's better for the, right? How weird is that? Seriously.

Molly Wood

my god, what a brutal discovery, right? You're like, well, we can be as good as coffee and that won't be enough. We gotta actually be better. Yeah, we gotta be different.

Andy Kleitsch 

We gotta be different. Yeah, like, right. And so we'd set out to be the same and as soon as we got to be the same, we realized, no, it's better to be different. So now we're like, okay, well, can we make it chai? Can we do zero? We can do a zero espresso, right? Which is, how many times have you gone to dinner and like would love to have an espresso after dinner, but you're like, right. Yeah, it's bedtime.

Molly Wood 

That's my favorite thing, that is my lifelong dilemma. It's bedtime, but I want an espresso, yep.

Andy Kleitsch

You want espresso, so now we have a zero. Yeah, right, right, exactly. So a zero could be a great thing for this. mean, there's a lot of ideas around like a caffeine, let's just say that the young kids are all interested in zero alcohol. We think that the reducing their caffeine intake is actually something that's really a popular trend.

Molly Wood 

I love the future.

Molly Wood 

Fascinating. Remind people where they can find a Tomo coffee just one more time before we go.

Andy Kleitsch 

Yeah, so we are [atomocoffee.com](http://atomocoffee.com/). That's where you can learn about us. really, Amazon is the place where we distribute our coffee, primarily, if you want to buy it and use it at home. And that would be a 50-50 blend that you can use in your house. And that's where I would recommend just hitting up that store and seeing what we're up to. That is the place where, as we do kind of these innovative, limited releases, you're going to see it there. And also, we're going to be announcing some limited release partnerships this year. Let's just say that there are some, we're being used as an ingredient in some products that will be coming out this year where you can imagine coffee flavored something, you know, that's all gonna be happening this year with us.

Molly Wood 

Incredible, keep an eye out everybody. Andy Kleitsch is the CEO of Atomo Coffee. I'm sorry that we ruined coffee for you, but on the plus side, we have given you options. Andy, thanks so much. We've given you hope and camels. Andy, thank you so much for the time.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

Now obviously I ORDERED some Atomo coffee and I gave it a try you can see video of that taste test on my instagram AT mollywoodpro and on LinkedIn and the brand new Everybody in the Pool TikTok account.  

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.

Thank you to those of you who already have. 

Together, we can get this done. See you next week.