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Avantium seen by a coffee drinker

You all know that you can make coffee by stirring a powder (Nescafé) and hot water in a cup. At Avantium we call this solid dosing to a heated and stirred batch reactor system. Instead of making one cup at a time, we have a robot that puts the Nescafé in a hundred cups at the same time. This is what we call a 100 parallel reactor system, and because we can make 100 cups in 20 seconds we call this high-throughput.

Another way to make coffee is to put the powder in a filter as with a coffee machine. We call this a fixed bed or flow reactor, and the water goes over it continuously. So we put 100 coffee making machines in a row and we get a high-throughput parallel workflow based on 100 fixed bed flow reactors.

A big difference to normal coffee making is that at Avantium we are not interested in drinking the coffee, but we want to understand how you can make the best tasting and strongest coffee, using as little coffee powder as possible in the fastest time. This is called Rational Screening. As we only need one drop of coffee to determine (or analyze) the color and taste, we make the cups and coffee filters as small as a tiny teaspoon. This is called miniaturization.