The Factory Making The World's Best Coffee

This is MIT. What are we doing?

We're at MIT, the Stanford of the East.

And the data gathered by researchers here suggests that you all have limited attention spans. You've been TikTok'd into a dopamine-chasing swipe prison. This beautiful building probably does nothing for you anymore. It's very pretty. Meow!

Kitten!

I don't want to believe the numbers, but the MIT nerds swear by them, and As we've come to learn, nerds never lie. Tom Brady! And so we're gonna get right to it. We've come to New England to make content for you all. This content will include the world's fanciest coffee, drone submarines, cures for cancer, and brains in vats! Lobster roll. If you've made it this far, then we're in this together. Our 30-second engagement rate is soaring. The algorithm is being fed like the pig beast that it is. And that means I should stop talking and show you something cool. This is Gloucester, Mass. It's a fishing city. And all sorts of uplifting movies like The Perfect Storm and Manchester by the Sea have been filmed here to celebrate the serenity of cod life. In large part because of the fish, this happens to be the place where commercial flash freezing was invented. Shout out to Clarence Birdseye, who started the General Seafood Corporation here in 1925 with his double-belt freezer contraption. Jump forward 100 years, and flash freezing in Gloucester remains crucial to our story, for we have come here to visit Cometeer.

We're here!

Welcome to the first brew-and-flash-freeze coffee facility on the planet.

Thank you.

This used to be a seafood processing facility. When we bought it, literally you could find crab legs around the building. You could smell fish from about 10 feet outside, so—

And you still bought it.

We still, we still bought it. We've shown it a lot of love over the past few years.

Matt Roberts is the co-founder and CEO of Cometeer.

Some people say Com-teer from Gloucester.

It is Cometeer from Gloucester.

And the fellow right by him is Alex Kaplan, the head of coffee product. These men are complete coffee obsessives.

When I got to Princeton, I opened up a coffee shop there. I spent a summer working on a coffee farm in Colombia and also took this coffee tasting certification that I ended up passing when I was 19 years old. I was the youngest Q-grader in the world.

I started off by making these pouches of frozen ice cubes to melt and dilute into iced coffee. I met George, the godfather of specialty coffee, and I showed him my early prototype, and he pretty much spit out the sample in front of my face. He was just like, "The look on your face, forget it, man." But then he served me a single-origin coffee from the Borbolla region of Ethiopia, and it just completely blew my mind. So then I went into his factory, his head barista, He brewed up samples with his freshest beans. I flash froze those samples with dry ice, and it was 6 months later when we melted down the flash frozen brewed samples, and the flash frozen brewed samples tasted like they were freshly roasted, ground, and brewed that week, which was incredible. That's when the light bulb went off. We just discovered the best way to preserve coffee on the planet.

Never would have believed you would have come up with a cup like that.

Cometeer delivers the absolute best-tasting coffee on the planet from a new format flash-frozen capsule. Now we know pretty much every other coffee company says they have the best-tasting coffee, but we've proven scientifically that our process captures flavor and aroma that you just can't capture in any other packaging format. So it starts with beans from the best farmers and roasters around the world.

This right here is About 900 pounds of freshly roasted coffee beans.

We grind and brew these beans with advanced equipment at 10x strength.

The grinder's in the secret room.

The grinder is in the secret room.

Okay.

And then flash freeze the coffee with liquid nitrogen moments later, and that locks in fresh flavor and aroma like never before.

The liquid nitrogen's -321 degrees. You can see the coffee being filled.

All you need to do is melt this frozen little puck of coffee that's like a super espresso shot into 8 ounces of hot water.

The dimple of freshness.

The dimple of freshness.

Or you can melt and mix and create iced coffee, latte, espresso drinks, and we all do it from a fully recyclable capsule.

We capture the spent coffee grounds. A company, Black Earth Compost, picks them up and recycles the grounds in a fertilizer, and then the capsule capsules rinse clean during use, so you can throw them right in with the beer and soda cans.

Okay.

Metal recycles forever, so that's us doing our part.

You said we might start with one called Alchemy?

Alchemy, yeah.

So this is George Howell's Alchemy. It's very comforting and familiar medium roast blend of coffees from Brazil, Kenya, Costa Rica, and Ethiopia. We'll take one capsule here, about 8 ounces at about 200 degrees. No machine, no equipment, just like that. And I understand this is your first sip ever of Cometeer, is that right?

Yeah.

All right, here we go.

It's really good, yeah, really good.

So we'll start here with a dark roast Guatemalan coffee from Huehuetenango, and this is a pretty intense kind of like rich flavor profile. You'll get like these fudgy dark chocolate notes.

Huehuetenango.

Yeah.

Great name.

You definitely slurp your coffee. That's where you get a lot more of the aromas. There's thousands of different aromatic flavors you can get, and you slurp your coffee, you really get—

I like that one. —nuanced flavor from that. Yeah, I like this one.

Yeah, the darker roast, nice. Now this is called the El Salvador Santa Rosa, a single origin, lightly roasted coffee. Some people say it tastes more tea-like. Than coffee because it's very light and delicate.

This feels chill. Like it's—

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right. Are you ready for your mind to be blown? Yes. So this next coffee is an extremely special coffee called the Finca Deborah Enigma Geisha from a very small region of Panama that's known for growing some of the highest quality geisha coffees in the world.

I've never smelled a coffee that smells like that. Mm, I've never tasted a coffee that tastes like that. Yeah, right? This definitely does not taste like my, whatever I make at home. It's like a different drink, yeah.

Yeah. Cometeer has raised more than $100 million, and a significant portion of that money has gone towards this factory.

We've dumped about $85 million into the complete renovations of the facility. We can do about 200 million cups a day. A year.

I'm trying to picture in my head what is inside that room. Is it one big machine?

Ah, there's a lot of stainless steel in that room, let's just say that.

The secret room looks exactly like this.

Does the beach have a name?

Um, I forget what the name of this beach is, actually.

I should know.

Matt actually grew up here, and so we dragged him away from his precious factory for some local color.

We are right outside the Beauport Hotel, the site of the original Birdseye plant. And right out in front of us every year during the St. Peter's Festival in Gloucester, they have the greasy pole competition. Anyone who is a third-generation Gloucester citizen gets the opportunity to try to run down the pole and grab the flag at the end. The young lads get a chance to show off for the lasses. It's really like a bunch of ex-fishermen who have had a few beers. Focus, footwork equals flag. There are people who grow up training for it in their backyard. A kid who won, he almost came to tears because it was his lifelong childhood dream.

I want to thank my mother and father.

Woo! Jessica Manning, my grandfather. Well, all my family. Dream come true.

Let it go, brother. Over the roof!

Viva San Pedro!

In truth, I just wanted a lobster roll. And I also wanted to hit Matt with a flash-freezing history surprise.

Were you not at some point like, maybe I've taken this coffee thing too far? I've gotten in. Deeper than I had intended.

Well, I think the hardest moment was going out, quitting my job, and starting the company with a credit card. I actually had 4 roommates at the time. I'm just like spending all the time in the kitchen. My roommates were like, "What the hell is wrong with Matt? Do we need to have like an intervention with him and his parents? He graduated top of the class, he's just making iced coffee all day, obsessed with his iced coffee." It was tough those first 4 or 5 months before we had received angel funding. You know, just getting over that hump was a challenge.

All right, I'm going to blow your minds.

And this is when I revealed to Matt that he was among flash-freezing royalty.

All right, so there's a gentleman named Cayman Hodges. Okay. Who's filming us right now. His great-grandfather was another gentleman named Wetmore Hodges. Wentworth Hodges. Amazing. There's a New York Times story here on his obituary. Mr. Hodges organized the General Foods Company and the General Seafoods Corporation, both of Gloucester, Mass. In the same period, he became associated with Clarence Birdseye, and the two developed the Birdseye process of freezing foods. No way. Mr. Hodges negotiated the sale of his two companies and the Birdseye process for $22 million. Holy shit. $22 million before 1929. That's like $350 million today.

$451 million. $451 million, okay, and my aunt's Julia Roberts. You guys aren't messing with me? That's true? You should, you probably have earned the right to walk the greasy pole. I think that's what you win now.

We salute you, Wetmore Hodges. Although Cayman does wonder how your generational wealth generated so quickly.

So I don't know if I mentioned this, but, you know, Jim Koch was a pioneer in the craft beer industry, right? And he actually crowdfunded the IPO for Boston Beer. The way he marketed to bars back in the day was super innovative. 20 years ago, craft beer didn't exist. Now it's 27% of dollar sales. And it just like took him a lot of time to get people over the hump. Specialty coffee's maybe like 15 years behind craft beer. Most people see coffee as brown, bitter water that needs the cream and sugar to make it taste good, just like people saw beer as like water with foam on top back in the day.

I'm just realizing now that you're maybe hitting a sweet spot because young people are drinking less. Yeah. Yeah. And caffeine is seen in a pretty good light for health reasons and then productivity, obviously.

I think it's a long-term trend in America, like the rise of the third space was the original idea for Starbucks' coffee shops, was instead of your home or the office, somewhere to hang out. And I totally think like people who drink less alcohol are more into coffee, so I definitely think it's a big trend and we're very well positioned, I think, to support it with Cometeer. Thank you.

Thanks so much. How many lobs are How many lobster rolls have you consumed?

A lot. A lot. The land of lobster roll.

There we go. Why yes, that is a Brex card. Come back to the channel soon as we make the very natural transition from coffee to autonomous weapons in Quincy, Mass.