World’s first roast-grind-brew coffee machine

Raw green coffee beans to fresh black coffee - at a single push of a button. Let's change coffee. Together.

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Bonaverde Coffee Changers

2,254 backers pledged $681,461 to help bring this project to life.

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World’s first roast-grind-brew coffee machine

by Bonaverde Coffee Changers

Update #36

Sep 12, 2014

The final mile: Tooling has started.

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Hey Coffee Changers,

another week has passed, it’s about time for a new update. We are making big steps these days and we are getting closer to finally delivering the world’s first roast-grind-brew machine every single day. In the last update we introduced you to our new team members and we are happy that we are about to sign the next world-class talents to disrupt the international coffee industry together with us within the next months and years.

Another very important step was taken yesterday: We finally ordered the tooling for our machine! With this decision there’s no way back anymore. The first roast-grind-brew machine will become reality and there are only minor iterations necessary before we start production. Tooling is generally the biggest step in a production process. It consists of the so called Bill of Material, a set of several hundred little to larger components, parts and pieces. Pretty much every screw is covered here with source, origin, weight, dimensions and function. As the machine we are building is new to this world and a complete genre of its own we had to develop and come up with most of the parts ourselves. Even today we continue testing and enhancing of details. Most of the software needed for e.g. the PCB is still in development. Yet, with the release of our CAD files for tooling we entered the last mile to set up production, build EB-1&2 and deliver what we've been waiting for. But there’s more news from the production side: Jergus spent the entire last week in Dettenhausen, close to Stuttgart, to work with our Swabian partner on the roasting filter, which has always been a major issue for this machine. During the roasting process, a lot of coffee oils develop. But as our roasting chamber is pretty small we needed a small but still extremely powerful smoke filter. The one developed now, after months and months of testing, enhancing and minimizing will be of absolutely best quality and entirely “Made in Germany”. Still, designing and finding a suitable color and finding its granulate provider challenged us during the last weeks. With our partner's expertise and Jergus' continuous testings we were however able to solve a lot of technical problems in no time. Next week Jergus will come up with all details about this filter in a special filter update here!

KICKSTARTER FAQS

We received several concerned questions from 38 of you below the last updates, others reached out to us via e-mail and messages here on Kickstarter. In order to give you the possibility to see our latest responses on these questions at a glance we have started an FAQ where we continuously plug in new questions raised and answer them as quickly as possible. This way, you don’t need to look through all these comments to quickly find the answer you are looking for.

You find our new Kickstarter FAQ section on

https://coffeechangers.zendesk.com/hc/en-ca/categories/200232921-Kickstarter-FAQ

If you feel like there is a question not raised or not answered well please feel free to put it in a comment here and we are going to add it to the list.

We want to reply to some of the most important questions right here.

Why Is The Chip Only Single Use? / Why Does It Make Sense To Only Let Beans From Your Farmers Be Used?

The chip is single use in order to prevent the usage of beans which are not directly traded from farmers. Our vision is to empower farmers on a global level. If we do not build entry barriers here, then all established coffee retailers can easily sell green beans which they buy for prices below production costs of the farmers and consumers can use it in our machine. Coffee is one of the best examples of a so-called "key article" which is used extensively in the advertisements of retailers. These key articles drive people into stores and thus are very often priced even below purchase prices. Therefore, retailers would be able to sell green beans they bought at world market prices a way cheaper than our farmers. We would not have changed anything, everybody would just continue to buy coffee in the supermarkets and the 25 million farmers on this planet would still found themselves exploited. For us - to make this clear - it would actually be a way easier if we decide not to do single use. We could talk to retailers to supply beans and we could just focus on building a great machine and make our money with selling machines. We could even sell our machines through these retailers and make even more profits. So why don't we do that? Because we have a vision which is empowering farmers on a global level, improving the live circumstances of these 25 million people. We are here to create the first direct trade network from farmers to end-consumers and not to end as just another machine manufacturer. This has been clear from the beginning and you can always count on that.

Why was RFID not mentioned in the original pitch?

When we set out to bring the machine in mass production we have proved that we can build a roast-grind-brew coffee machine but we did not have our business plan ready and we did not really know what it needs to really enable our vision. In fact, we still assumed that we would have to bring in very complex profile settings to make the machine adjustable for the many different coffee varieties out there. We know that you as highly tech-affine people would probably not face major problems, the average consumer, however, would have significant difficulties in using this machine. We learned this lesson every time we talked to our 15,000 tasters last year. Once we discussed this issue with our manufacturer he presented us a solution he already built in other machines which were able to store profiles for favorite coffee settings (milk/no milk etc). Although we know that this limits in a first step customization it makes this machine usable for anybody. And: We would not have taken this decision after our kickstarter campaign when we did not know that we can eliminate these limitations later on. The first step was now to make the machine usable for anybody, the second step will be to enable customization to your preferences. We have not decided about the technology we will use but we would like to already present you one possibility: A smartphone app to control the roasting degree using the new technology of NFC.

We believe that smartphones in the future will all use NFC (Near Field Communication). In easy terms, NFC is basically a communication standard which facilitates the free exchange of data within a small area. Using an “NFC-App” will have the following advantages:

It can be used in every operating system (iOs, Android, etc.)
Creation and storage of personal recipes/free programming
Exchange of recipes and discussion about different roasting styles within the community
Professional roasters offering their customized profiles
No more chips needed, can be replaced by e.g. QR codes

A realistic launch date of a machine with this technology can be the end of 2015. To build this we will rely heavily on our community and create a visions portal until the beginning of 2015.

Why was it not possible to build the old design?

The round top of the old design made it impossible to include all technical features. When started building the old design we also discovered some misproportions in the design drafts (see picture below) which made it taller than what we expected. Because of that, if we wanted to realize the old machine it would have been a way taller than the new one.

TALLER. The old design (with correct proportions) compared to the new.

Another problem we faced was concerning the production material. Grinding coffee requires a lot of physical power and therefore the whole machine has to persist this continuous tension. The old design was built of wood which proved not suitable for this kind of machine. In order to work around these size and material problems the machine would have caused more than double the production costs we had planned. Therefore, there was no chance to implement the old design.

You see the gigantic dimensions we faced when we tried to build it in the picture below. None of our team members had a kitchen where we could have put that monster in.

GIGANTIC. Trying to build the machine with the old design.

You find answers to more questions on our Kickstarter FAQ page.

BONAVERDE HANGOUT WITH HANS & PATRICK

We haven’t done anything like this before. But we would like to invite you to the very first Bonaverde Hangout with our Managing Directors Hans & Patrick. You’ll have the chance to raise all your questions about the machine, our vision, our company, our girlfriends, pets, ... - you got it. Face to face, open and transparent, that’s how you want it and that’s what we offer. If you want to join this hangout and be part of the discussion please send an e-mail to hangout@bonaverde.com. The hangout will take place on Sunday, October 4, at 3pm (CEST). In order to make this as productive as possible we will pick three applicants.

That’s it for this week. A final shoutout goes to the ones who still contribute their naming ideas for our machine. We have 381 suggestions so far and still counting. Thank you very very much. You can still shoot yours to us at http://www.bonaverde.com/coffee-machine.