Bueno Beauty: naturally-derived beauty

As beauty brands continue their quest for natural beauty products and plant-based ingredients, new business models are emerging that explore more sustainable sourcing and production. Experts at Mintel have recently highlighted the transition from ‘food to face’ of vegan products, for example, and the trend looks to continue to grow.

Two by Two interviewed one innovator, Alejandro Franco, co-founder of Copenhagen-based Kaffe Bueno, a coffee business, to find out more…

What is Kaffe Bueno?

AF: Kaffe Bueno is a biotechnology company that uses coffee’s by-product to produce natural ingredients for cosmetics, nutraceuticals and functional foods.

How did you start the business – and why Copenhagen?

AF:Kaffe Bueno was started by 3 Colombians; Alejandro, Camilo and Juan. It has evolved, changed and adapted a lot since we started in 2016.

Having met as business students, we realised our strong belief in ethical coffee sourcing and sustainability was matched by our appetite for entrepreneurial ideas – and set out to create a business that benefited Columbia farmers and nature alike.

Denmark is one of the highest coffee consuming countries in the world, with 50 million kilos of coffee per year and Copenhagen has a booming biotech start-up community, with one of the world strongest recycling cultures.

What drives you as a business?

AF: What drives us everyday is the responsibility we have to change the perception of coffee: to look at it as a product to improve people’s and natural health, whilst redistributing wealth back to where it belongs, farmers.

Kaffe Bueno is also driven by the untapped potential of the by-product of the magical bean, historically treated as waste. Coffee is the most bioactive and consumed yet most underestimated, under-utilised and undervalued plant on Earth.

“Coffee has the highest polyphenol content found in any plant“

When did you discover the properties of coffee as beneficial to beauty and personal care production?

AF: We first started to get into coffee’s chemistry when learning about coffee production, roasting and brewing. We’ve always been proper coffee geeks…

Discovering the properties of coffee as beneficial to beauty and personal care happened when we started researching on coffee grounds’ composition, ‘post-brew’. The fact that barely 1% of coffee is actually used when making a cup encouraged us to look deeper into the possibilities lying inside spent coffee grounds.

We found out coffee has the highest polyphenol content found in any plant – meaning extremely high in antioxidant activity – as well as rich in tocopherols, diterpenes and many other compounds associated with anti-ageing, skin-whitening, skin-repair, anti-cellulite, moisturising properties. 

Our previous coffee knowledge told us it is composed of 20% oil. We then found out coffee oil is already a thing in the cosmetic industry due to its known skin benefits. However, it is currently extracted from green and roasted coffee beans. After reading a lot of publicly available research, we found out the lipid fraction [oil] remains intact after the coffee beverage is made. So we thought, “why not use this waste as a resource, if it’s still packed with benefits?”

What’s the process?

AF:We’ve created a patent-pending machine to dry the grounds at origin.

So, this machine is placed at coffee-waste producers around Copenhagen, coffee is dried at origin; risks eliminated and costs decreased. Grounds are collected by a partner who delivers them to our biorefinery in Copenhagen, where we use only natural solvents and low temperatures to extract the bioactive inside them. Our first extract is Recycled Coffee Oil, which comes only from Arabica beans we can trace back to the farm at which they were grown.

Looking into the oil’s and defatted grounds composition, we’ve identified a lot more opportunities to naturally produce a wide range of ingredients for markets like nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals. We will heavily invest on R&D to accelerate the development of these ingredients, and in time tell you more about them.

Which brands do you admire and whose success do you look to emulate?

We admire brands like WALA (parent of Dr. Hauschka) and Primavera Life for their notorious commitment to increase transparency between brands and consumers. Weleda is also a great example.

If brands or potential partners are interested, how do they contact you?

They can contact me at Alejandro@kaffebueno.com

www.kaffeebueno.com