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Roasting coffee requires high temperatures — up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit for as much as 20 minutes per batch. Today, the vast majority of that heat is generated by fossil fuels. Most of the world’s coffee is roasted in gas-burning machines that emit carbon dioxide and require elaborate venting and afterburner equipment.
Ricardo Lopez, CEO of Bellwether Coffee, has spent the past 12 years fine-tuning a more climate-friendly, electricity-powered alternative, one that, crucially, cuts down on some of the costs and complexities of other electric roasters.
“Our goal is to make a sustainable industry through coffee,” he said. For Bellwether, that includes working with small farms to source beans grown with environmentally friendly practices.
But Lopez, a former data-center construction manager, knows that making a new technology competitive in a crowded field takes more than good intentions. “You have to have a better product,” he said. “As long as you have a better product that’s more affordable from a cost standpoint, it can spread.”
Achieving that has taken quite a bit of ingenuity. For starters, Bellwether’s system doesn’t require the industrial-scale voltages that many European-made electric coffee roasters do. The company’s appliances run on the 240-volt or 208-volt current available in commercial buildings.
The machines also use closed-loop heat recovery to capture and filter the smoke and particulate matter that the roasting process produces, avoiding the ventilation, ductwork, and energy-intensive “afterburner” systems needed to clean up exhaust.
That makes the Berkeley, California-based company’s technology suitable for ordinary retailers. Bellwether refrigerator-sized or countertop-sized roasters are now in cafes and coffee shops in 40 U.S. states and more than a dozen countries.
“Distributed roasting means that every coffee shop can become a roaster,” Lopez said during a recent tour of Bellwether’s headquarters, which featured a sampling of some of the specialty blends sourced from farms the company works with.
That said, making the switch to roasting coffee beans in house isn’t cheap. Bellwether’s latest countertop roasters sell for $22,000, or $27,000 for its “continuous roasting” variant. This sounds like a lot, until you realize that a high-end espresso machine is about the same price, Lopez said.
And the savings from buying raw coffee beans for about $5 to $6 per pound rather than roasted beans at about $12 to $14 per pound add up quickly. Bellwether has a calculator to help determine how long it takes to recoup the up-front cost of its roasters — typical customers pay off their machines in two to 12 months, depending on the volume of coffee they roast, Lopez said. The company offers financing deals with monthly payments that can put most buyers at a cash-flow break-even point within the first month, he noted.
Bellwether’s electric roasters also appeal to large-scale roasting facilities seeking to make small-batch, high-end blends for an increasingly sophisticated coffee-drinking public. One example: the Hero collection from Red Bay Coffee, one of two Oakland, California-based industrial coffee roasters using the startup’s machines.
The closed-loop, electric roasting process is more energy efficient than traditional fossil-gas roasting — about 2 to 3 cents of energy spent per pound of roasted output, compared to about 10 cents per pound, Lopez said.
And, of course, the whole process is less emissions-intensive than relying on fossil gas to produce coffee. Roasting accounts for up to 15% of the coffee industry’s carbon footprint, and a Bellwether roaster cuts about 87% of the carbon footprint of traditional roasting, said Jonathan Bass, the company’s executive vice president of marketing and communications. That’s a significant reduction in what admittedly is a relatively slender slice of the industry’s overall climate impact, which is heavily tied to land use and deforestation.
But those emissions reductions are the end-of-day bonus to a fundamentally economic proposition, Lopez said.
“Our customers love the fact that this is the most environmentally friendly way to roast coffee, and love to communicate that to their customers. But most of them wouldn’t be able to do it if not for the quality benefits or the economics,” he said. “You’re able to take one of your highest expenses and cut it in half while having a better, fresher product that’s environmentally friendly because it’s no longer dependent on natural gas.”
Electric coffee roasters have served as niche products for small-scale craft roasters for years now. But companies like Bellwether and others in North America and Europe are scaling them up.
Bellwether’s technology has evolved over the years. Its early coffee roasters were cobbled together with steel plating and wooden two-by-fours, Lopez said during the August tour of the company’s headquarters and manufacturing space in West Berkeley. More improvements have followed since its first commercial models rolled out in 2018, including a steep cut in their initial price of about $60,000.
Bellwether has put particular effort into honing its roaster’s closed-loop heat-recovery system, which retains much of the warmth that gas-fired roasters lose in their exhaust, Lopez said. Capturing heat that would otherwise be wasted also helps control for the variables of temperature and humidity that can make it hard to achieve consistent roasting quality, he said.
Plus, Bellwether has fine-tuned the “set-and-forget” software controls that allow busy employees to program precise outputs for each batch of green coffee beans being put through the roaster, Lopez said. “The freshness and consistency of the roasting has so much impact on the quality,” he said.
Just ask Keba Konte, founder of Red Bay Coffee. The photographer-turned-entrepreneur started roasting coffee in his garage and moved into a warehouse that has housed successively larger gas-fired coffee roasting machines, including his current one capable of roasting 120 kilograms of coffee beans per batch.
In 2023, Red Bay won a $643,000 grant from the California Energy Commission to defray the cost of installing eight Bellwether machines. The undertaking did require some wiring upgrades, Konte said — but that’s a lot less onerous than designing and installing the gas lines, vents, and other infrastructure required for his gas-fired roasters.
The Bellwether machines also “allowed us to engage in another segment of the market,” he said. “We work with farmers, and our team is super-interested in these experimental coffees. … There are so many interesting things happening in the industry right now.”
It’s hard to dedicate a batch run of Red Bay’s 120-kilogram roaster to these more experimental blends. With the Bellwether roasters, “we were able to distinguish ourselves by introducing some of these small lots,” including ones from former employees who’ve struck out on their own, he said.
Konte is also exploring how Bellwether’s technology could help the company expand to new markets. Rachel Konte, his wife and Red Bay cofounder, was born in Denmark, and the couple has been looking for opportunities to expand into that country. Denmark currently charges luxury taxes on gourmet coffee imports, which made the plan infeasible.
But “if we have a Bellwether sitting there, and we import the same raw green coffee that we have here, that’s sort of a production thing — and so now, that’s just industrial ingredients. There’s no barrier,” he said. “And then the machines, because they’re already preprogrammed — we have our master roaster here making adjustments based on age of coffee, based on humidity, etc. — we can be producing our coffee, branded, in that country.”
Coffee roasting isn’t the only industry that could deploy smaller-scale, lower-carbon technologies to decentralize production. Companies are developing factory-built, electricity-powered modular systems to purify iron for steelmaking, synthesize industrial chemicals, and produce ammonia fertilizer.
Food and beverage production is a particularly appealing target, given that nearly all of the industry’s current fossil-fueled heating needs are for relatively low-temperature processes well suited to electric heat pumps, electric boilers, waste-heat recovery systems, and other lower-emissions options.
Nancy Pfund, founder and managing partner of investment firm DBL Partners, one of the lead investors in Bellwether’s $40 million Series B funding round in 2019, said mass-produced technologies like these have the potential to quickly drive down costs, similar to what has happened with solar panels and lithium-ion batteries.
“The greatest way to increase the impact of sustainable technologies is to make them, one, affordable enough to be widely adopted, not niche, and two, to achieve greater quality than approaches that are more harmful to the environment,” Pfund said.
In the case of cafes and restaurants, “that allows them to pay employees more, or pay their rents,” she said. In the case of coffee-roasting facilities, it’s “affordably reducing air pollution in communities. All of that wonderful, good stuff — and you have this amazingly delicious cup of coffee.”
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