IKAWA is revolutionising the way we roast and drink coffee with the world’s first digital micro-roaster.
Unlock a world of fantastic flavours and beautiful aromas by roasting your own coffee at home in minutes!
However you like your coffee whether it’s a dark espresso or a light filter roast it comes from ‘green’ unroasted coffee beans. To get the perfect coffee you need the best green beans and the ideal roast tailored to those beans.
The IKAWA Home Roaster enables you to roast your coffee at the push of a button. We offer a range of top quality green coffee beans from iconic locations, and provide roast recipes to bring the best flavours out of the beans.
Brew your coffee how you like: Cafetière, Pour-over, Espresso, AeroPress, Moka pot or Filter, the IKAWA Home Roaster will take your connoisseurship to the next level – simply select the roast recipe on your smartphone, drop the beans into the roaster and watch them roast – it will take between 3 – 10 minutes.
Then if you’re feeling adventurous, adjust recipe to create your own perfect roast: change roast duration, temperature and even the air flow with your smartphone or tablet to open up a world of flavours.
1. Roast your coffee like a professional: IKAWA Coffee is supplied with a recommended roast recipe, each recipe perfectly tailored to bring out the best flavours of different coffee beans. The IKAWA Home Roaster will work with any green coffee, not just the beans we supply.
2. Fully customisable roast recipes: Get adventurous! You can adapt IKAWA’s recommended roasting recipes or create a new one from scratch. See video “Product Development and Key Design Features” in the “More technical detail” section.
3. Share Roast Recipes: Share roast recipes with a community of coffee lovers using Facebook, Twitter and the IKAWA forum.
4. Sleek addition to your kitchen: Designed to fit into a modern kitchen, the roaster has a small footprint – similar to that of a kettle. It’s made from top quality materials and will weigh approximately 4.3kg / 9.5 lbs.
5. Available Worldwide: IKAWA Home Roaster models are designed for all international power supplies. There will be the option for 220 – 240V roaster (as used in UK, Europe, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and most countries!), 110 – 120V versions (for North America, Central America, Venezuela Taiwan amongst others, and even a 100V Home Roaster for Japan. There will be a small shipping cost of £25 for European Union countries, and FREE shipping to Rest of World. We cover VAT for European Union countries, but not for other countries where local taxes and duty may vary.
6. iOS and Android compatible: The IKAWA Home App will work with both iOS and Android. Other operating systems (such as Windows and BlackBerry) may be considered as Stretch Goals – please contact us at info@ikawacoffee.com to register interest.
Thanks to our invention, you can now choose green, unroasted coffee beans from iconic coffee origins and discover your perfect way to roast them.
Unroasted Green coffee stays fresh for much longer, which means, you can now make a truly freshly roasted cup of coffee, using beans sourced directly from producers.
IKAWA enables this win-win situation and new dimension to direct trade. Coffee drinkers receive excellent quality green coffee beans and can roast them how they want, and coffee producers get reinvestment to help improve coffee quality which will generate more income.
IKAWA will re-invest 10% of profits into coffee quality improvement projects led by the Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation (CPF) in Africa and Latin America. CPF will also distribute micro-roasters funded via our £20 reward scheme. Roasters will be used to support smallholder farmers test and learn more about the quality of their own coffee – something they very rarely have the opportunity to do. CPF works with a network of 280,000 smallholder farmers globally, which makes them an ideal partner to achieve a greater impact, rather than setting up our own distribution scheme. This also means we can focus our energy on delivering the first batch of Home Roasters to our backers!
IKAWA inventor Andrew grew up in developing countries where his dad worked with coffee farmers. It was this experience that gave him the idea for the micro-roaster, which he designed while studying at the Royal College of Art in London 6 years ago. IKAWA has gone on to be a finalist for Best New Product at Speciality Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE) 2012 for the first Professional Roaster and was finalist in Business Global Social Venture Competition of Berkeley University in 2011.
Andrew, together with co-founder Rombout Frieling, made hundreds working prototypes before launching the IKAWA Pro Roaster, which is now used every day by leading coffee professionals all over the world.
The real challenge was to build a machine that could reproduce a roast accurately, regardless of the environment.
IKAWA has unique patented roasting technology and uses top quality components. During the roast process a papery skin comes off the coffee – called chaff. Over time this would block a normal filter – so we included a cyclone that will never get blocked. Our roasting system is patented with support from James Dyson.
IKAWA has built a strong team fuelled by constant supply of freshly roasted coffee who are super excited to be launching the Home Roaster.
We thought you might like to know a bit more depth about the design process, and how some of the key features work so made this short video
Below are some of the aspects of the roaster we’re most proud of:
It will take 8 months from a successful Kickstarter project to deliver the Home Roasters. A considerable amount of time will be spent on testing the machine to ensure it is safe and works perfectly.
All roasters are CE marked. Roasters sold to North America will also be UL Certified.
Below are the 15 tests we undertake.
Through this Kickstarter project we aim to raise enough money to pay for our first production run of the IKAWA Home Roasters. You can help us achieve this through backing our campaign.
We’ve taken this idea a long way already; built a network of suppliers, and created an award winning professional roaster. We know what it takes to deliver projects successfully and have well developed plans in place for the Home Roaster we’re launching on Kickstarter.
Backing from Kickstarter will enable us to:
The Money we raise through Kickstarter will be spent on the following:
In order to make the Home Roaster more affordable than the Professional Roaster we are having to evolve our designs and produce the roasters in larger production runs. There is always some degree of uncertainty when creating any new product, but we have taken every precaution to avoid this causing disruption and have extremely advanced plans already.
We have the benefit of a strong network of manufacturing partners and the experience of several production runs of the Pro Roaster so have learnt a lot about the best ways to plan and produce IKAWA Roasters. Similarly, we have a global warehouse network set-up already which will help us to deliver the roasters to your door.
We have been realistic with our timings, allowing a reasonable amount of time for each step of the production process.
Please see Q&A section for any questions you may have, or if they’re not covered, drop us a line through Kickstarter or to info@ikawacoffee.com and we’ll be happy to help.