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This Kickstarter Hit Finds a Way to Unlock a Whole New Coffee Market
The designers behind the Humanscale manual relaunch return to crowdfunding with an idea for coffee
By Allison Fonder - April 4, 2018
On Kickstarter, it feels as if designers are constantly coming up with new ways to redesign a device to brew your coffee or a product in which you can enjoy your beverage. In a world rife with likely unnecessary coffee products, it's hard to imagine something that actually creates new demand for a product that is both novel and useful. But as shown by the smashing success that is IA Collaborative's Kelvin coffee roaster, the need for a product that helps the everyday consumers roast their own coffee beans proves to be in very high demand.
What are the benefits of roasting your own coffee at home, you might ask? For one, the optimal time to enjoy the flavor of the coffee bean is when they're freshly roasted. That means when you buy those big bags of coffee, it's likely the beans are stale, as they only stay fresh for about 3-4 days after roasting.
Secondly, premium unroasted coffee beans are well under the $15-$20 price you would pay for a premium roasted bag (unroasted beans normally go for about $5 to $7 a bag). A product like Kelvin combines both the opportunity for optimal flavor and notable yearly savings.
Enter a caption (optional)When it came to the possibility of roasting coffee at home, one person at IA Collaborative highlighted a serious lack in availability, as IA Collaborative Founder and Chief Design Officer Dan Kraemer noted: "an architect who works with us pitched this idea of home roasted coffee. He has a buddy who home roasts his own coffee, I think he uses a hot air popcorn maker, which believe me, is not ideal."
After digging into some research, they noticed a few things. There's a niche market of consumers with a serious dedication to excellent coffee, but there are several suspect products and methods for roasting beans at home that hardly promise consistent results. There's also the fact that the pathway to ordering your own raw green coffee beans is incredibly confusing and obtuse. So with Kelvin, they designed both a product that roasts your beans as well as an app that allows you to easily order green beans according to your preferences.
Enter a caption (optional)IA Collaborative believes the app gives Kelvin the utility of both a product and a service and is where they are creating new demand. Normally to buy raw beans, Kraemer noted that "you have to search these websites that don't explain exactly what you're buying." Kelvin's app gives you more information about the beans you order and some suggested roast times, which they hope encourages people to learn more about the art of coffee roasting. "We're looking at coffee making as more of a culinary experience," says IA Collaborative Design Engineering Director Luke Westra, "you are taking this food product and you're cooking it, releasing aromatics and oils, so we're excited to show people that journey and have people engage in what for a very long time was a very functional beverage."
Kelvin takes less than 10 minutes to roast your coffee beans and allows for endless experimentation: "once you experiment, you could get 500 different variations," says Kraemer, "flavor can change by the second." In addition to a sleek look, Kelvin also has double-wall construction so it remains cool to the touch, an auto-cool down function to ensure the roast of the bean is exactly to your liking, and it collects coffee bean skins for easy disposal.
Enter a caption (optional)IA Collaborative is of course known for initiating a long overdue re-release of Henry Dreyfuss's Humanscale manual, which they noted was of great help to them in the process of developing Kelvin: "referencing Humanscale for Kelvin, we asked what's the optimal diameter of this front handle? And the affordance here so you can pull it out easily? It even has strength, like what's the maximum the thing should weigh in order for an average adult female to pick it up." To develop both the product and the app, they also worked intimately with a number of craft roasters who would give feedback on the flavor of the beans roasted on their working prototype and they helped to develop a collection of beans to make available on the app that would be best utilized in a home roasting environment.
All in all, IA used their extensive experience in product development with their clients to ensure they were creating a product that felt intuitive, ergonomic, and perhaps most importantly, was a more essential addition to the growing coffee industry than just another french press or coffee machine. As of the time this article was published, Kelvin was well over its $40,000 goal clocking in at $243,414 with more than 30 days left to go—so as it seems, products like Kelvin have promising potential to dominate their very own sector of the coffee industry by putting the power of coffee roasting into the hands of the consumer.
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This Kickstarter Hit Finds a Way to Unlock a Whole New Coffee Market
I wouldn't have the guts to copy an existing design and pass it off on Kickstarter as new. I bought a ten-year-old one of these at Value Village for $15.
The older one I have is closer in design to the "new" Kickstarter ripoff.
Facts to keep in mind here: There's a roughly 20% weight loss in the coffee roasting process from its green state. Roasted coffee is best when let rest for 24-48 hours after roasting. From there, if sealed, that can last for maybe 2 weeks without grinding. Final roast temperatures range from 410-455F, which highlights the fire risk of any device. The process produces a significant amount of smoke and aroma throughout its temperature rise, from sticky sweet grassy, to peanuts, to a final coffee finish. Doing this un-vented and indoors is probably not ideal. Lastly, control of the heat vs air varies widely across the roast time spectrum, and differs by bean. Using one push button roast recipe, and then controlling the duration is just not going to work for a range of beans. Their profile aims for 400f, which is not ideal.
From their Kickstarter site:
"How does Kelvin deal with the smoke generated during the roasting process?"
"We kept the batch at a smaller size (100 to 120 g of green beans) and our prototypes have proven we can minimize exhaust. Kelvin is similar to other products that toast or cook things in your kitchen—you will be able to smell the beans roasting, a preview of that perfect cup of coffee."
Disclaimer: I still think this is some hipster bs and that while roasting your own coffee sounds like fun, for the majority of us that drink coffee regularly, this is just going to be a lot of extra components and processes to bother with and eventually abandon and forget about. The minor flavor difference seems to me like it won't be worth the time and effort.
However, its nice to see that they actually seem to have prototyped the hell out of this thing and accounted for the issues before pushing their kickstarter.
Totally agree. I had a friend who roasted coffee with a popcorn popper, it worked really well but smelled awful. I was hoping the innovation was they found some way around the smell, like an activated carbon filter or something.
I have been roasting coffee at home for years and this product looks great! I have thought for a long time that there were no well-designed roasters and that something like this could be a really successful product. As for the smell, some people like it and some people don't. As for the smell, if you don't like the aroma of fresh roasted coffee, then maybe roasting coffee isn't for you. ;D