Koppie Wants to Replace Your Coffee Bean — Not Your Coffee Ritual

BEVERAGES

Harleen Singh

6/15/20267 min read

This is an AI generated illustration and does not represent actual product or service.

A Ghent-based startup just published a patent application that's worth a closer look, not because it promises to "disrupt" coffee (a word this industry has heard far too often), but because it tackles a problem most coffee-alternative companies have quietly avoided: getting a non-coffee ingredient to behave like coffee in your grinder, your filter, your espresso machine, and your cup — all at once.

The company is Koppie BVBA, founded in Ghent, Belgium. Its newly published international patent application, WO2026/115173 A1, filed via the PCT route in December 2025 with priority claims back to two Belgian filings from December 2024, describes a method for turning native pulses — chickpeas, yellow peas, fava beans, lupins and similar legumes — into a roasted product that can be ground and brewed like coffee. Koppie calls the resulting ingredient the "Koppie Bean."

Coffee alternatives are not new. What's new here is the specificity of the process, and the fact that the inventors have documented, with comparative data, exactly which steps matter and why.

The Problem Koppie Is Actually Solving

The patent's background section lays out a case that will be familiar to anyone tracking coffee sustainability: coffee is a roughly $100–150 billion crop, consumed daily by a large share of the world's population, and demand is projected to grow 30–50% as incomes rise across Asia, Africa and Latin America. At the same time, arable land suitable for coffee is shrinking under climate pressure, coffee cultivation is already a major driver of deforestation and fertilizer-related emissions, and the economics for farmers in major producing countries remain poor — the application notes that average coffee farmer income in the top ten producing countries sits below the poverty line.

That combination — rising demand, shrinking supply, and an unsustainable production model — is the setup for every "coffee alternative" pitch. But the patent is unusually candid about why earlier attempts haven't closed the gap.

It sorts prior alternatives into three rough categories. "Type 1" alternatives — roasted chicory, dandelion root, date seed, malted grains, acorn, burdock — deliver a roasted note but lack coffee's flavor complexity and often carry off-notes, and they typically only work in filter or pour-over brewing. "Type 2" alternatives, developed in response to demand for natural decaf, are blends of these same ingredients (chicory, malted grains, figs, acorns) but suffer because only some components are roasted. "Type 3" alternatives are functional blends — coffee or coffee substitutes mixed with adaptogenic mushrooms (lion's mane, chaga, reishi) or stimulants like guarana and maca, aimed at the "focus without jitters" crowd.

None of these, the patent argues, actually replicate the brewing behavior of a roasted coffee bean across multiple formats — filter, capsule, instant, pod. That's the gap Koppie is targeting.

The Technical Core: Fermentation Before Roasting, on an Intact Bean

The central claim is a multi-step pretreatment applied to whole, native pulses — not ground, not pureed, not extruded — before roasting. The sequence, in simplified form, is:

First, enzymatic polysaccharide degradation, primarily targeting starch, breaks down complex carbohydrates into fermentable sugars. Second, an acidification step — preferably via lactic acid bacteria fermentation — brings the pH below 6 (and in preferred embodiments below 5.5 or even below 5). This is often followed by a yeast fermentation stage aimed at building flavor complexity. Third, a drying step brings moisture content down to 14% or less (with more preferred ranges down to 7-8%), at temperatures the patent says should stay below 60°C to avoid premature flavor development or texture problems. Only after all of this does roasting happen, at temperatures between 75°C and 250°C, with a preferred working range of 150–200°C.

The pulses can be partially or fully dehulled and partially split, but — and this is repeated throughout the document — they are not subjected to any size-reduction step like grinding before this process. The inventors describe this as the chickpeas remaining "morphologically intact," which matters for two reasons: it allows the product to be brewed using conventional coffee equipment after a standard grinding step, and it differentiates the approach from at least one piece of prior art cited in the search report — Northern Wonder's earlier applications (WO2023/182882 and WO2023/182883), which the document explicitly notes require size-reduction, mixing, and homogenization of ingredients to create an extruded coffee bean substitute.

That's a meaningful strategic distinction. Extrusion-based approaches can standardize shape and density easily, but they introduce a manufacturing step (extrusion) that changes the cost structure and equipment requirements compared to roasting a near-native legume. Whether "stay closer to the native bean" is the better commercial bet than "engineer a synthetic bean shape" is genuinely an open question — both are patent filings, not proven manufacturing pipelines, and patents protect the idea, not a guarantee that either approach scales economically.

What the Comparative Examples Actually Tell You

The most useful part of this filing, for anyone trying to understand why the process is built the way it is, isn't the claims — it's the comparative examples, which read almost like a deconstructed sensory experiment.

Skip the starch degradation step, and a professional Q-grader panel scores the result noticeably worse, with increased lingering bitterness and a lack of sweetness and acidity. Skip the acidification step, and bitterness overpowers sweetness — the panel notes, reasonably, that "coffee requires a certain acidity to be denoted as coffee." Skip the yeast fermentation, and the product loses the fruity, roasty, buttery complexity that yeast metabolism contributes. Skip dehulling, and the hull roasts unevenly relative to the interior, again increasing bitterness. And critically, if the pulses aren't dried below roughly 9% moisture before roasting, you get non-uniform hardness after roasting — which then causes problems with grinding and with extraction (high water absorption, low TDS, low extraction yield, and physical blocking of filters and machinery).

That last point is the one that should interest anyone in product development. A lot of legume-based coffee alternatives probably fail not on flavor first, but on brewing mechanics — the product clogs filters or doesn't extract properly because the internal structure of the roasted legume isn't uniform. The patent frames moisture control before roasting as the lever that fixes this, which is a genuinely practical, equipment-compatibility-driven insight rather than a flavor-chemistry one.

The Sugar Story — and a Quiet Acrylamide Angle

Two of the worked examples (using fava beans and yellow peas, with enzyme blends supplied by Novonesis) show something worth dwelling on. In the yellow pea example, the raw dehulled split peas start with a sugar content of 3.18 wt%. After the full enzymatic-fermentation-drying-roasting sequence, sugar content drops to 0.04 wt% — essentially consumed. Carbohydrate content actually rises slightly (63.5% to 71.6%), consistent with starch being broken down into oligosaccharides that remain in the matrix while free sugars get fermented away.

In other words, the process appears to work the same way coffee roasting does: sugars generated by enzymatic action are largely consumed during fermentation and roasting, and the flavor that results comes from the metabolites and Maillard reaction products of that process — not from residual sweetness. That's a fairly elegant parallel to how green coffee chemistry actually works, and it may explain why this approach gets closer to a "real coffee" flavor profile than the simple roast-and-grind methods used for Type 1 and Type 2 alternatives.

There's also a quieter detail buried in the enzyme table: one of the enzymes used, described as an asparaginase preparation, is explicitly noted as reducing acrylamide precursors during subsequent thermal processing. Legumes are generally higher in free asparagine than coffee beans, which means that roasting raw legumes at coffee-like temperatures could, in principle, generate more acrylamide than roasting coffee — a regulatory and food-safety consideration that's easy to overlook when the marketing framing is "just roast some chickpeas." The patent claims the final acrylamide content is lower than coffee from tropical beans, which — if it holds up under regulatory testing — would be a meaningful selling point given the EU's ongoing scrutiny of acrylamide levels in roasted foods. This is an area where independent verification will matter, since acrylamide claims tend to get tested closely once a product reaches retail.

The Sustainability Numbers — and Why They're Hard to Compare

Separately from the patent, Koppie has shared its first life-cycle assessment figures: 1 kg of roasted Koppie Bean produces 1.2 kg of CO2 equivalent on an ex-factory basis, alongside 11 liters of water (excluding cultivation rainfall) and 5 square meters of land use. Stacked against commonly cited coffee benchmarks — Carboncloud figures ranging from roughly 4.5 to 20.4 kg CO2 equivalent for unroasted coffee depending on origin, and the often-cited Poore & Nemecek (2018) figure of 28.5 kg CO2 equivalent for roasted and packaged coffee including retail — the gap looks dramatic.

But the comparison needs a caveat the company itself flagged: these numbers aren't measuring the same boundary. "Ex-factory" excludes packaging, distribution, retail and brewing energy, while the 28.5 kg figure explicitly includes packaging and retailing, and the Carboncloud figures are for unroasted green coffee. A fair comparison would require Koppie's number to be extended to the same system boundary, or the coffee benchmarks to be stripped back to an equivalent ex-factory basis. Until that's done — and until there's an agreed methodology across the category for what "ex-factory" even includes for a fermented-and-roasted legume product — the headline gap should be read as directional rather than definitive. That said, even a partial reduction in water use (11 liters versus coffee's notoriously water-intensive cultivation) and land footprint (5 m² versus the land required for coffee cultivation per kilogram) would be a meaningful sustainability story if it holds up under a like-for-like comparison.

What to Watch

For R&D and innovation teams tracking this space, a few things are worth flagging. First, the patent's emphasis on format flexibility — filter, instant, capsule, and pad formats are all named as intended applications — suggests Koppie is positioning the Koppie Bean as an ingredient platform rather than a single consumer product, which is the more capital-efficient route for a small team and opens licensing or B2B ingredient-supply possibilities alongside any direct-to-consumer play. Second, the use of named commercial enzyme products (Novonesis's Vertera and Acrylaway lines) in the worked examples indicates Koppie isn't trying to vertically integrate enzyme production — a sensible choice that keeps the barrier to entry on the process and recipe side rather than fermentation infrastructure, but it also means input costs and availability are tied to third-party enzyme suppliers' pricing and roadmaps.

Third, and most practically: the comparative examples make clear that getting this right requires controlling moisture content to within a few percentage points before roasting, managing fermentation pH precisely, and choosing dehulling and splitting levels carefully. None of that is exotic processing technology, but it does mean consistent quality at scale will depend on tight process control across what is fundamentally an agricultural input with natural variability — the same challenge coffee roasters have managed for centuries, just with a different raw material and a much shorter track record.

Whether the Koppie Bean ends up on shelves, in someone else's blend, or licensed into another company's supply chain, the patent is a useful reminder that "coffee alternative" isn't really one problem. It's flavor chemistry, brewing mechanics, food safety, and life-cycle accounting, all bundled together — and this filing is one of the more thorough attempts yet to address all four at once.