Caroline Siefarth

FOR HAVING A BALL WITH COFFEE

“WHEN I HELD IT

in my hand, I said, ‘This is it.’ It just felt right,” Caroline Siefarth says of Coffeeb, the truffle-like matte brown sphere she spent five years developing after Swiss company Delica tasked her with creating the seemingly impossible: a coffee capsule with virtually no capsule at all, the first in the world to leave no waste. While other brands have been trying to introduce biodegradable options, they still contain bioplastics and paper that can take years to decompose. Siefarth and her team devised a coating that uses alginate, a natural polymer, and other components to form a flavorless and heat-resistant oxygen barrier. It prevents roasted coffee from losing its flavor, yet “completely biodegrades in weeks by just putting the used balls in regular soil,” she says. (By not using any kind of plastic or aluminum, it also greatly reduces CO2 emissions.) The other big challenge was of Siefarth’s own making: the spherical shape, which is mathematically perfect, yet not good for extracting coffee. The Coffeeb Globe brewing unit (which runs around $180; the balls cost about $4 for a pack of nine) was designed first to make the sphere malleable before changing it into a cylindrical shape—and then extracting the coffee. Despite the complexity, the magic-ball gamble has paid off. Delica won’t disclose sales numbers, but it says that the reception in Switzerland and France since its September 2022 launch was strong enough that in April 2023 it expanded to Germany— Europe’s biggest coffee-pod market. Other countries are to follow.