Finland may be the happiest country in the world, but it also has another excellent quality: it world’s largest coffee consumerThe country’s population of 5.6 million grinds and steeps the equivalent of 12 kilograms—or about 1,560 cups of coffee—per capita annually, according to the International Coffee Organization.
The coffee market is expected to generate Revenue in 2024 will be $487.5 million.National coffee roasters have turned to creative solutions to meet high demand, according to Statista. These innovations include the use of artificial intelligence to create coffee blends, an experiment. Helsinki Kaffa Roastery took this week.
The roaster, the country’s third largest, partnered with Elev, a Finnish artificial intelligence consulting startup, to create “AI-conic,” the roastery’s first blend built with large language models (LLMs).
The roastery staff provided ChatGPT and Copilot with a series of tasting notes and asked which beans would produce this flavor profile. Experimenting with LLM combined four different components—an unconventional move, but one that worked surprisingly well. Kaffa’s staff did not make any changes to the AI’s offerings.
“This (trial) was the first step towards understanding how AI can help us in the future,” Kaffa managing director and founder Svante Humpf. told AP. “I think AI has a lot to offer us in the long term. We are particularly impressed [by] descriptions of the taste of coffee that he created.”
In Finland there is strong coffee culture partly due to its location north of the Arctic Circle, which produces long days– sometimes in 19 hours of sunlight – which requires constant caffeine intake. Some Finns drink up to eight cups a day. Finnish cafes are not only places where locals can drink coffee; they are also the epicenter family child care servicescementing coffee as central to Finnish culture.
But while Caffa has immersed himself in coffee experiments, the craze for AI-created drinks did not originate in this Scandinavian country. The Coca-Cola Company launched 3000 yen in September – a drink with a flavor suggested by AI, which should resemble “what Coca-Cola from the future might taste like.” Specs X Brewery in Columbus added two beers to its menu in February, based on unconventional flavor combinations created using artificial intelligence, such as pineapple, strawberry and slightly sweet lactose.
Advanced coffee technology
The Finnish coffee industry has been using unconventional technologies for many years. The VTT Technical Research Center of Finland has found a way grow coffee beans in the laboratory by immersing cells in a liquid containing enzymes and nutrients needed for their growth.
Indeed, climate change has done this It’s harder to grow coffee on farms as the heat in areas where the industry’s most common Arabica bean is grown has become inhospitable to the plant. Other bean varieties, such as Robusta, can grow in a wider range of climates but have a milder flavor than their counterparts. The industry also combats soil pollution, deforestation and chemical treatments. influence on the yield of coffee beans.
But while coffee bean farms can only produce a couple of harvests a year and are also limited labor-intensive processing harvest – scientists can produce laboratory beans in about a month. However, the rise of lab-grown coffee technology doesn’t mean these beans are ready to hit the mass market.
“Although the roasted cell coffee samples shared several common aroma compounds with traditionally prepared coffee, the full aroma and taste of the cell coffee samples require further efforts to resemble conventional coffee as closely as possible,” Heiko Rischer, Head of Plant Biotechnology at VTT. and colleagues wrote to 2023 Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry study.
Lab-grown coffee may not taste as good as farm-grown alternatives, but roasters and distributors have embraced the idea of using the beans in the future if climate change requires it.
“I think we’ll go down that path someday because all the sources of natural coffee will disappear, so we’ll have to move on… If it tastes good and has a coffee-based aroma, why not? I think it’s possible,” barista from Helsinki. said Reuters.