While the standard companion to a cup of coffee is usually a donut or a bagel, the baked goods sidekicks could now carry caffeine and antioxidants on their own, thanks to a new process for making coffee bean powder, the patent for which Prof. Daniel Perlman ’68 (PHYS) got approved in December.

Perlman, who also helped create the butter substitute Smart Balance, began experimenting with green coffee beans two and a half to three years ago. “I’ve been intrigued for a long time with the antioxidants that are provided in coffee, and have long wondered whether something could be done to increase the amount, or yield of antioxidant in the coffee bean to make it a healthier product. I’ve also been intrigued by whether roasting coffee beans the traditional way resulted in loss of something really beneficial from the coffee bean,” he said in an interview with the Justice.

The coffee bean powder — which has the trademarked name Nutra-Viva Coffee Beans — can be used in foods, beverages and dietary supplements, according to a nutritional data sheet compiled by Perlman and the New England Coffee Company.

While green coffee bean extract has been commercialized and touted as an antioxidant-rich supplement, Perlman believes the coffee bean powder allows those antioxidants — namely chlorogenic acid (CGA) — to be used in food ingredients, making it generally more palatable and more useful than in bean or pill form. He added that his process of baking the beans at a lower temperature — or “parbaking” them — is necessary to avoid having the flour be too dark and the taste of coffee too overwhelming.

Perlman explained that of the two varietals of coffee beans — arabica and robusta — he chose to use the latter, because even though it is less popular in the United States, it contains higher levels of CGA and caffeine. The next step in his process is roasting the beans at approximately 300 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas the typical coffee bean is roasted at between 400 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

Throughout the research process, Perlman received support from the New England Coffee Company, which is located in Malden, Mass. Yet while they provided Perlman with coffee beans and roasted some batches under controlled conditions, most of the roasting was done in his own kitchen. Perlman also conducted some research at the University, measuring residual antioxidant and moisture content in the roasted beans.

In order to produce the flour-like texture, the beans are then milled using a hammer mill and liquid nitrogen. “Nitrogen is used to protect all kinds of food materials from being degraded with air or oxygen,” he explained. “Your potato chip bags are usually flushed and packaged with nitrogen, so if you buy Frito chips, they’re usually filled with nitrogen, rather than air, so the oil in the chip doesn’t go rancid by air exposure. Similarly, we use liquid nitrogen to do two things: it chills the beans during the milling to make them more brittle, but it also protects the nutrients in the bean from being degraded by oxygen in the air.”

The result, he said, is a finely ground, golden-colored powder with a slightly nutty taste. Each particle, he added, is roughly one tenth of a millimeter, or 100 microns in size. “We do that so you’re not getting a gritty mouth feel when you eat it, you’re not chomping on little pebbles. If you bake bread or muffins with our flour as an ingredient, you don’t notice any adverse texture because the particles are small.”

Perlman emphasized that the coffee powder is preferable to extract pills because it allows the nutrients to remain in a natural state. He also said that consuming the green coffee beans in their natural state is not feasible because “as a raw agricultural product, it tends to carry with it mold spores and bacteria, and you can’t just randomly eat a raw agricultural product. So our baking accomplishes multiple things: it drives off at least about half the moisture … and then baking sterilizes the bean, so now it’s a safe food ingredient. Baking also gets rid of some of the raw flavor that’s undesirable.”

He added that a snack bar baked with coffee powder could have as much caffeine as a cup of coffee, but with more CGA. He also noted that he has tried using the powder in bread, muffins, brownies, hummus and nut butters, and that samples have been sent to bakeries.

Moving forward, the University’s Office of Technology Licensing is looking into licensing the patent for the parbaking process, which, according to Perlman, would allow it to be produced and sold as a regular food ingredient. “This is really designed to be a regular food ingredient, not so much to replace the conventional flour, but to supplement recipes,” he said.