After years of building and scaling startups across emerging markets and food tech, Therese Scherer found herself returning to a question that had lingered since her time at Infarm: why do we let so much food rot before it ever leaves the farm? The answer led her from vertical farming in Berlin to fermentation at origin, working directly with farmers. Luvi Bio was born to stabilize fresh crops within hours of harvest, turning wasted biomass into high-value functional ingredients. Starting with coffee cherry pulp, the company connects overlooked farm side streams with real market demand. The ambition is simple but bold: fix food waste where it actually happens.

My whole career has been in startups and scaleups where I got a lot of responsibility pretty quickly. My first job right out of university was with Rocket Internet, building a real estate classifieds platform in Ethiopia as the first person on the ground. It was a crash course in building from zero: hiring a team, setting up operations and running a business in a market I knew nothing about. I also fell in love with the country and its wonderful coffee, which is a link back to what I am building with Luvi today.

When I came back to Berlin, I stayed within the Rocket circle but switched into food, which has always been personal to me. My mom is a passionate hobby chef, always hunting for the best ingredients, always curious about where food comes from. That is how I grew up. So when I had the chance to become a vertical farmer and join Infarm after their Series A, it felt like the right move. I loved working there. We were scaling fast, opening new markets, and I got to work closely with the founders. That proximity to the founders made me realize that I wanted to take those big strategic decisions myself one day.

That opportunity came when I met Louise and Bodil from Kost. They were exploring how fermentation could be used to stabilize fresh agricultural produce and turn it into valuable ingredients instead of waste. The idea immediately resonated. And more importantly, we shared a similar way of thinking about systems, food, and company building. Becoming co founders felt like a natural next step rather than a leap.

The problem we are solving is massive: around 40% of all the food we produce globally is wasted, and a huge portion of that happens on farms, not at the retail or household level like most people assume.

Every year, 1.2 billion tonnes of food are lost on farms. That is more than what gets wasted by retailers and consumers combined. When I first read those numbers in the "Driven to Waste" report, I could not believe it. Imagine: we are growing food on 4.4M square kilometers of land, an area larger than India, only to have it rot in the field or get discarded because it cannot be sold in time. That waste alone is responsible for 2.2 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent emissions every year.

Surprisingly this is not just a problem in low-income countries. More than half of the food lost at harvest happens in high- and middle-income regions, driven by market structures, timing issues, and a lack of alternatives for farmers when crops cannot be sold fast enough. At the same time the industry is panicking about feeding 10 billion people by 2050. But we clearly already produce enough food for that. Right now. Today. We just let almost half of it rot. So the challenge is not some futuristic production problem. It is fixing the broken system we have today.

If we want to solve food waste at the farm stage, we have to work directly with farmers and act fast. Many crops and side streams spoil within hours after harvest, so the window to capture their value is tiny.

Luvi Bio enables farmers to stabilize fresh biomass immediately after harvest through fermentation, before it has a chance to rot. That stabilized material then becomes the basis for high-value food and beverage ingredients.

Our first product focuses on coffee cherry pulp, which is a massive side stream in coffee production. Coffee is one of the most traded commodities in the world, but what most people do not know is that the coffee bean only makes up about half of the fruit's biomass. The other half is the pulp, and globally, coffee production generates more than 26 million tonnes of it every year. Over 90% of that pulp is discarded. To put that in perspective, that is equivalent to Europe's entire annual banana consumption.

The pulp itself is actually a superfruit. It is packed with antioxidants, polyphenols, and natural caffeine. But it spoils within hours after harvest, so it is almost impossible to work with unless you stabilize it immediately. By fermenting the pulp directly at origin, we preserve its nutritional value, unlock bioactive compounds through the fermentation process, and add pre- and postbiotic properties. Then we process it further into an off-the-shelf ingredient for the beverage industry, where brands are actively searching for functional ingredients that provide natural energy and real health benefits.

We are essentially connecting a massive, unused biomass stream with very real market demand. And the world can stop worrying about running out of natural caffeine due to climate change and rising demand. Trust me, we have millions of tonnes of it decomposing on coffee farms. It just tastes more like hibiscus tea than a flat white.

We do two things really well. First, we design fermentation recipes that actually work on farms, not just in labs. The goal is to maximize the nutritional value available for the human body while enhancing the taste profile. But it also has to integrate seamlessly into a farmer's existing operations.

Our microbial consortia, which is the mix of yeasts, bacteria, and enzymes we work with, are designed to be robust enough to handle real-world conditions where temperature and humidity fluctuate. This is not a lab environment. It is a farm. Things are messy. And the fermentation has to work anyway.

Second, we build functional ingredients that brands actually want. We put a lot of effort into designing the downstream process so that all the nutritional value we capture early on is preserved as we turn the stabilized biomass into a commercial ingredient. At the end of the day, we sit between the farmer and the market, turning waste into value.

This is what drives me when I am frustrated with the daily grind of being a founder. The potential is massive on both sides of the value chain.

For farmers, especially in coffee where they capture the smallest share of the value chain, we create new revenue streams from biomass that currently has little or no value. That can make a real economic difference.

For brands, we offer ingredients that are not just sustainable on paper but genuinely better in terms of function, nutrition, and story.

Even in our first year of commercial operation, we are planning to process around 100,000 tonnes of fresh coffee cherry pulp. That prevents a significant amount of food waste and the associated emissions. If we scale globally and work with coffee producers across multiple origins, those numbers grow very quickly. And coffee is just the starting point. There are so many other crops and side streams where this approach could work.

We have two revenue streams. The first is a licensing fee that farmers pay to use our fermentation technology and the know-how on how to set it up and run it. Over time, the goal is for farmers to be able to sell their stabilized crops to any ingredient company who wants to turn it into a higher value add product. The second revenue stream, which is the bigger one, comes from brands or co-distributors who use or sell our ingredients.

With our first product, we are mainly talking to beverage brands who are already working with this side stream. Right now, they have to do all the sourcing and processing themselves, and they run into supply and quality issues. Our ingredient offers an off-the-shelf solution with stable quality, consistent taste, and additional health benefits. The response has been strong. There is real interest from brands who see the value in having a reliable, functional ingredient without the operational headache.

We operate at the intersection of several fast-growing markets. The global functional ingredients market is expected to reach $232B by 2034, growing at a 6.9% CAGR. But what really excites me is the caffeinated beverage market, which is projected to hit $463B by 2032, growing at 6.8% annually. That growth is driven by functional beverages and the fact that Gen Z is drinking less alcohol but loves the combination of convenience, function, and healthier alternatives to soda.

In terms of competition, we are up against big ingredient producers, but their operations are set up centrally. They need access to already stabilized biomass, like dried coffee cherry pulp. We work decentrally, hand in hand with the farmer, which gives us an advantage. We are not just competing for market share. We are expanding the ingredient universe by creating ingredients that would not otherwise exist.

We are laser-focused on getting our technology out of the Danish lab, onto farms, and into a commercial, off-the-shelf ingredient for the beverage industry within the next 12 months. Not a pilot that lives forever in R&D, but something brands can actually formulate with, launch, and sell. Speed to market is critical in ingredients because nothing replaces real demand signals.

Years two and three are more of a dream than a structured plan, but the vision is to scale up, work with multiple farmers and brands around the world, and take coffee cherry pulp out of its niche and into the mainstream. We want to prove that our approach works economically for producers and that we are not just reducing waste but creating something genuinely valuable.

We have raised €200K in pre-seed funding from Kost Capital. That funds our first year, taking us from lab-scale fermentation to a sellable ingredient. It is a sprint, but we are getting a lot of interest from both farmers and beverage producers, and we are co-creating the ingredient with brands to avoid some of the typical mistakes in ingredient development. That co-creation process gives me confidence we can pull it off.

We have a pretty good network of farmers who want to work with us. There are roughly 12.5M coffee farmers in 70 countries, so we are not short on potential partners there. What we are really looking for are beverage brands who want to disrupt the industry and create products with real health benefits built for the next generation. If that is you, let us co-create this ingredient together.

But honestly, I am also extremely open to talking to anyone who has something valuable to contribute. Ideas, perspectives, partnerships. Just reach out.

You can reach me via email at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.