Kaffe Bueno, which uses by-products from the coffee industry to create ingredients that can be used in beauty and personal care products, said Borregaard, which led the funding round, will now be a strategic partner and member of its board of directors.
Other investors included The European Innovation Council and existing investors PINC (the venture arm of Finnish Paulig), The Yield Lab, EIFO (Export & Investment Fund of Denmark) and Dalgaard group.
Co-founder and CCO of Kaffe Bueno, Alejandro Franco, said the funding injection will help the company’s innovations reach the market faster, with more studies and data, and at larger scales. “It is a testament to the need for the urgency to make the industry more sustainable, using coffee-derived compounds as a tool to achieve that,” he shared.
"A tool to reduce manufacturing's Scope 3 emissions"
The company also said that with this new partnership, and the results of its continuous R&D, it will be able to expand its operations into new areas such as advanced materials and agriculture, and further “unlock coffee's health potential as a tool to reduce manufacturing's Scope 3 emissions.”
President and CEO of Borregaard, Per A. Sørlie, said of the partnership: “We realise that it will take time to scale up and fine tune production and to establish a global business, but we see this as an interesting opportunity with potential synergies between the two companies in several functions.”
Kaffe Bueno started up in 2016 and is part of a growing movement in the beauty industry and other FMCG industries to transition to bio-based ingredients, to meet increasingly strict environmental regulations in the EU, UK and beyond.
The coffee-based ingredients supplier opened its first biorefinery in Copenhagen in late September 2023. Its first focus is the personal care industry, where active ingredients such as KAFFOIL, KAFFAGE and KAFFAIR have already been launched into the market.
