"AI-conic" is Kaffa Roastery's AI-developed coffee blend

Kaffa Roastery is a Helsinki-based artisan coffee bean roastery devoted to providing Finns with the best coffee in the world. Their business is based on hand-roasting and packaging ethically sourced coffee beans in their roastery so customers always get freshly roasted coffee. Their AI-conic coffee blend was developed in collaboration with AI consulting firm Elev. In developing AI-conic, both parties wanted to explore how generative AI could contribute to coffee roasting, an artisan profession highly respected in Finland, a nation with the highest per capita coffee consumption, at 12 kilograms.

Kaffa Roastery provided Elev with some data about its best-selling coffee blends to develop AI-conic. In turn, the Elev team fed the data to LLMs together with the indication to create "a new exciting blend". The resulting blend comprised four beans: 40% Brazil, Fazenda Pinhal, 25% Guatemala, La Bolsa, 25% Colombia, San Lorenzo, and 10% Ethiopia, Geruke. This struck the team at Kaffa Roastery as somewhat unusual, with the managing director and founder Svante Hampf acknowledging that he was surprised by this departure from the traditional two or three-bean picks usually featured in blends to allow drinkers to distinguish the flavor profiles of each bean. However, blind testing from the successful first test roasting revealed that the AI-conic blend was perfect and required no human intervention.

As a final distinctive touch, the team brainstormed with GPT-3.5 to pick "AI-conic" as the ideal name, and AI artist Sani Leino contributed the visuals featured in the coffee's packaging. Everyone involved in the AI-conic project agrees that the collaboration was a success. In Elev’s spokesman Antti Merilehto's words, “AI-conic is a tangible example of how AI can introduce new perspectives to seasoned professionals.”