Have you ever wondered how much coffee from the farm actually ends up in your cup in the morning? From the biomass harvested at the farm in Colombia or Zimbabwe, only 0.2 percent is ingested, the rest is simply left to rot.

The Chinese scientist Shuting Chang demonstrated in his lab in Hong Kong that coffee serves as an ideal substrate for farming tropical mushrooms like shiitake or ganoderma. But coffee waste is not only an ideal substrate: it generates jobs, income and food security. Chido Govero, an orphan from Zimbabwe, set up her own business of mushroom farming on coffee waste, and thus generates food and job security in Africa.

In 2009 a couple of graduates from Berkeley University started a business collecting the coffee waste from the coffee shops to grow mushrooms in the inner city, providing competitive and high quality food while generating jobs. Where ever in the world people farm or drink coffee, in the city or countryside, waste can be converted to protein.

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