About a year ago I remember being pleasantly intrigued seeing ground coffee for sale at the Café Coffee Day in Lulu Mall, Kochi. Whoa, I remember thinking: This was smart – first you pay for the coffee, then you buy the waste generated by the coffee. Then, always in sodality with novelties, I was impressed. I knew it was good fertilizer still called up my mother whose interest in farming was more than passing. ‘Yes, they are good compost,’ she assured me. ‘And I believe they are good in nitrogen among other organic matter.’ I was sold, bought two packets.
The other day while waiting for my sister and family to turn up for a lunch date, I went into CCD again to see if I could buy more. They didn’t sell it anymore, but they had upped the game.
“We decided it was about time we did something more with our vast output of ground coffee,” said Narasimha Sastry, Area Manager, CCD for Kerala who was manning the counter while training some new personnel. He showed me the neat, no-frills coffee mugs made from recycled coffee grounds displayed on the shelf. Priced at about Rs 300 each, just the right size, with ‘earth-friendly coffee’ printed on the side and a tag announcing its origins.
CCD owns about 20,000 acres of coffee plantations in Chikmagalur, Karnataka, making the beans needed for their hundreds of stores and thousands of vending machines across the country. “There was indeed a rising demand for coffee grounds especially in the metros from people with small terrace gardens or window plants,” Sastry said. “But we decided to literally make something out of it than just sell it.”
As I paid for two, somebody walked in to enquire bulk prices for corporate gifting. It was flying off the shelves, I could see.
Then, these were coffee mugs – in the real sense!
Wanting to know more, I did a spot of reading up and came across Kaffeeform from Berlin and its founder Julian Lechner who first got the idea in 2009. It was an apt thought – an average German consumes about 14 pounds of coffee every year!
Watch the video here for the history and other basic components in the production: https://youtu.be/kMX7aQpIwl4?si=p8iicbvI3tZuaN1X
(‘Green Fellas’ by Farmfrnd is a series of impressive, everyday initiatives having a sustainable impact on the environment.)