What Is Upcycled Coffee? Cascara and the Other Half of the Coffee Plant

Written by Marc Narrie, founder of Buddha Beans Coffee Co. and specialty coffee roaster since 2019. Buddha Beans has been infusing coffee with CBG since launch, making it one of the first CBG coffee brands in the US.

Upcycled coffee means using parts of the coffee plant that normally get thrown away, and turning them into something worth consuming. The clearest example is cascara: the fruit that grows around the coffee bean, dried and brewed as a tea instead of composted or dumped. When you drink cascara, you are drinking the other half of the coffee plant.

The idea is simple. Coffee farming produces the bean and a lot of leftover fruit. Upcycling asks whether that leftover has to be waste at all.

What "upcycled" means

Upcycling takes something that would have been discarded and gives it a higher use, rather than just recycling or throwing it out. In food, upcycled products are made from ingredients that would otherwise have gone to waste: spent grain, fruit pulp, offcuts, husks. The point is to capture value from what a supply chain already produces instead of growing more.

Coffee is a natural fit for this, because harvesting coffee creates enormous amounts of fruit that traditionally had no market.

How much of the coffee plant gets thrown away

When you look at a coffee cherry, the bean is only a small part of it. The two seeds sit in the middle, wrapped in skin, pulp, and a parchment layer. During processing, the beans are pulled out and the surrounding fruit, the majority of the cherry by weight, is separated off. For most of coffee history that fruit was treated as a byproduct: composted, spread as fertilizer, or discarded.

Multiply that by the scale of global coffee and it adds up to a huge volume of fruit that the world mostly did not use. That is the gap upcycled coffee steps into.

Cascara: the clearest example of upcycled coffee

Cascara is upcycled coffee you can hold in your hand. It is the dried coffee cherry, saved instead of thrown away, and steeped into a naturally sweet tea with notes of tamarind, dried cherry, and dark fruit. The exact taste is hard to pin down, and it does not line up neatly with any other tea. Nothing is added and nothing extra is grown. The fruit was already there; cascara just keeps it out of the waste pile.

That is why cascara sits at the center of the upcycled-coffee conversation. It does not require a new crop or a new farm. It uses more of the plant that has already been harvested.

Why it was wasted for so long

For most of modern coffee, the bean was the entire business and the fruit was a disposal problem. There was little demand for the cherry, drying it took effort, and moving an unfamiliar product to market was hard. It took the rise of specialty coffee, and a wider push to waste less food, for producers and roasters to start treating the cherry as a product rather than a leftover.

The other half of the coffee plant

We think about cascara as the other half of the coffee plant. You already know the bean: roasted, ground, brewed. Cascara is everything that was wrapped around it. Drinking it is a small way to get more out of a crop that farmers have already grown, harvested, and processed.

Other ways coffee gets upcycled

Cascara is the best-known upcycled coffee product, but it is not the only one. You can browse our full lineup to see how we put the whole coffee plant to work. The coffee cherry and its byproducts have also been turned into coffee-fruit flour used in baking, and the husk and pulp are used as compost and animal feed on many farms. Cascara tea is simply the version you are most likely to drink from a cup.

Frequently asked questions about upcycled coffee

What is upcycled coffee?
It is the practice of using parts of the coffee plant that are normally discarded, such as the fruit around the bean, and turning them into something usable like cascara tea.

Is cascara the same as upcycled coffee?
Cascara is the most common upcycled coffee product. It is the dried coffee cherry brewed as a tea, made from fruit that would otherwise be waste.

Is upcycled coffee sustainable?
It uses more of a crop that has already been grown and harvested, rather than requiring a new one, which is the core idea behind reducing food waste.

Does upcycled coffee taste like coffee?
Cascara does not. It tastes like tamarind, dried cherry, and dark fruit with a hibiscus-like tartness, with none of coffee's roast or bitterness. The exact taste is hard to pin down against any other tea.

Try our first batch of Cascara Coffee Cherry Tea

Our Cascara Coffee Cherry Tea is upcycled coffee you can drink: the fruit around the bean, dried and steeped into a soft, cherry-sweet tea. It is the other half of the coffee plant, and this is a small first batch, so grab it while it lasts. Read more about what cascara tea is or its long history.

Shop Cascara Coffee Cherry Tea →

This article is for general information and is not medical advice. Cascara Coffee Cherry Tea is a food, not a dietary supplement, and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Cascara is the dried fruit of the coffee cherry (Coffea), sold as a food and herbal beverage, not as a dietary supplement or drug. It naturally contains caffeine, about 25mg per cup. It is not cascara sagrada, an unrelated plant sold as a laxative. Nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. If you are pregnant, nursing, or sensitive to caffeine, check with your healthcare provider.

Upcycled coffee products use the 60 percent of the coffee cherry that traditional coffee processing discards, turning agricultural waste into cascara tea, flour, syrups, and antioxidant extracts with measurable nutritional value.

The coffee industry generates approximately 10 million metric tons of coffee cherry waste annually, and cascara production converts a significant portion of that waste into a commercially viable food product.

Cascara qualifies as an upcycled food under the Upcycled Food Association standard because it transforms a byproduct that would otherwise decompose in landfills into a shelf-stable, nutrient-rich tea ingredient.

Parts of the Coffee Cherry and Their Uses