Coffee flour may become your new favourite gluten-free flour

Move over almond, quinoa and coconut flour -- coffee flour, made from the fruit of the coffee plant, packs a nutritional punch that's hard to beat.

Vancouver-based startup CF Global Holdings has discovered a way to turn a by-product of coffee manufacturing into a flour with sweet undertones of citrus and cooked fruit.

While still in the manufacturing stage, this nutrient-dense flour is expected to hit store shelves sometime next year, adding to the already overwhelming market of gluten-free flours.

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“My wife made some shortbread cookies and granola,” Dan Belliveau, company owner and former director of technical services at Starbucks, tells Businessweek. “When it actually tasted good we thought, wow, we’ve got something here."

During his coffee career, the entrepreneur discovered that after coffee beans are extracted from the bright red cherry pulp, the edible and highly nutritious pulp is discarded as waste -- but has the potential to be dried and milled into a highly nutritious flour.

He has now created a patent-pending process for milling the specialty flour, which is currently being churned in three continents ahead of its release.

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The company boasts that coffee flour contains three times more iron than spinach, five times more fibre than whole-wheat flour and 84 per cent less fat than coconut flour. Plus, the flour is naturally gluten-free.

For those worried about the caffeine content, Belliveau says it's extremely minimal. A person would need to eat seven to 16 slices of bread made with coffee flour to get the equivalent caffeine dosage of a single cup of coffee.

CF Global Holdings says coffee flour is best used for baking in conjunction with other flours. The product can also be used in pasta, as a dry rub for meats and in sauces.

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Belliveau says the production of coffee flour should help coffee farmers bring home extra income, since they're now capitalizing on something that was previously discarded. He estimates farmers could make 30 to 50 per cent more in profits than what they normally make.