The article talks about a couple of substitutes. The "lab grown" coffee likely has the same problems as lab grown meat - it's unlikely to ever be cost competiti

The article talks about a couple of substitutes. The "lab grown" coffee likely has the same problems as lab grown meat - it's unlikely to ever be cost competitive due to the economics of cell culturing. This is a well researched article[0] about why that's the case. The other stuff, Atomo, is honestly more troubling. It's a hodgepodge of random seeds and plant products processed to look like coffee grounds. You can see the list of ingredients on their site[1] and while there's nothing that's immediately objectionable (except for fructose - what the fuck is that doing in there? roasted coffee has virtually no fructose), it just seems gross and definitely not coffee. The writer claims they couldn't taste the difference in a milk-based drink and I don't doubt them, but it's just not coffee. Coffee is processed fairly heavily (though less so many other common foods like pasta or jarred tomato sauce or something), but this is clearly an engineered product. It shouldn't be able to be called coffee and I am dreading the day when coffee shops swap this out as the default option and there's an upcharge for coffee made from beans. I'm also not excited about the inevitable parade of articles planted in various media outlets snarkily alleging we're all planet killers for drinking environmentally destructive "bean coffee" likely planted by this firm's tradegroup as submarine marketing [2]. Mr. Kleitsch (or any other employees of Atomo, or anyone else in the industry cooking up this crap), your product is not coffee, there is no such thing as "Beanless Coffee" (including chicory or other substandard substitutes) and your attempting at marketing are misdirected. Consider clearly acknowledging that your coffee is a coffee substitute instead of trying to make the one small, cheap thing that makes daily life bearable for billions of people worse. [0] https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca... [1] https://www.atomocoffee.com/pages/beanless-coffee https://www.atomocoffee.com/pages/beanless-coffee [2] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html