It’s all about caffeine – #TEE18 video5

For most of us, caffeine is just a precious component of coffee. A molecule which is able to keep us alert and awake and charges us up.

But caffeine is also waste material. It becomes precious waste material, when it is extracted from the beans destined to become decaf coffee.

There’s a whole world behind this waste material. Caffeine, which looks like dark mush at first, is refined until it becomes a white powder used in a wide range of sectors: cosmetics, pharmaceutical and even, again, in the food and beverage industry, eg in soft drinks.

Trieste is the home base of one of the only three Italian decaf companies. A business carried out only by a handful of companies in the world.

This video shows this specialization of Trieste, capital of coffee. A series of 10 videos about the variety of activities revolving around coffee manufacturing.