03 Nov 2015

FOODTECH WEEK – THE FUTURE OF COFFEE

IKAWA was delighted to take part in London Food Tech Week, the world’s first week-long celebration, showcase and collaboration of food industry-leading brands, innovators, startups and entrepreneurs.

Alex Georgiou from IKAWA and Colin Pyle from CRU Cafe at The Hoxton, FoodTech Week event. Image ©Sami-Jo Adelman

We were lucky to have this right on our doorstep, and made the most of the fantastic array of events – we manged to find our way to UX design for Food Apps where Malwine Steinbock, founder of Cookbooth and Dan Ziv founder of Uncover shared their insights into creating successful food apps – we’re working on improvements to the IKAWA Pro App at the moment, so this was a fascinating opportunity.

Also managed to bag tickets to a Table Crowd event, Seedcamp X FoodTech, and ‘An Insider’s Guide To…’ with Richard Reed and Martin Morales – to by the time ‘our event’ came around on Friday we’d already had a great week!

The Future of Home Roasted Coffee Featuring IKAWA event was hosted by CRU Kafe CEO Colin Pyle and took place at The Hoxton in a fantastic covered courtyard.

Colin kicked things off with ‘the coffee scene’ from The Green Hornet, where it’s fair to say the espresso machine used is pretty futuristic.  CRU Kafe have created a range of super high quality Nespresso compatible pods using Fairtrade and organic coffee. Colin likened their pods as the software that Nespresso ‘hardware’ has been craving.

IKAWA’s coffee roasters are most definitely hardware – and we had the chance to demonstrate the roaster using a medium roast on washed Peruvian Arabica beans. You can view the profile below.

Through a Q&A with Colin, Alex shared IKAWA’s experience taking the exciting concept of home coffee roasting to a reality, insights into our recent Kickstarter campaign, and some of the bigger picture vision of IKAWA: Wouldn’t it be great if coffee producers could directly ship coffee to your house with a roast profile? You can read more about IKAWA’s vision for how home coffee roasting can change the value chain from this recent interview with FoodBev.com

Demonstrating the IKAWA Pro Sample Roaster in action. Image ©Sami-Jo Adelman

The audience was an interesting mix of coffee professionals, tech enthusiasts, food professionals and others who were really keen to see the IKAWA roaster in action, and it lead to a great range of questions from the audience – from explaining how the IKAWA Pro App 2.0 (coming soon!) will capture First Crack, our plans to reinvest 10% of green coffee revenue with Cafédirect Producers Foundation about quality improvement projects, how consumer will be able to build a community and share their roast recipes, and questions around why in an age of convenience you would want to roast your own coffee – all very thought provoking.

It was a real honour for us to be part of this event, and makes us even more excited about the Home Roaster that will be available next year!

Thanks to Colin, the guys at CRU Kafe, and Nadia el Hadery from FoodTech Week for making this happen.

author-img By Alex Georgiou