Two Scottish entrepreneurs have big ideas on replacing palm oil in the home. Starting local with the goal of making it global.
Scott Kennedy and Fergus Moore have came up with a unique way to extract oil from used coffee grounds which has a huge range of potential uses.

Palm oil, the current go to oil for many of our house hold products has proven to be very unpopular and rightly so, this is more due to the rather destructive way in which production of the oil has been scaled up in recent years with large amounts of ancient rainforest being cut down in the pursuit of this useful oil. It's always interesting to see other alternatives creeping in, even more so if they are  considered a by-product of another process.

Mr Kennedy and Mr Moore came up with their coffee grounds idea while working in coffee shops during their university years studying business in Glasgow's Strathclyde University. Working in a coffee shop is where they saw first-hand the amount of food waste produced by the hospitality sector, 60% of all cafe's waste is coffee grounds alone according to Mr Moore:

Further explaining the potential uses of this oil he explained that the oil uses extend to the cosmetic, pharmaceutical, food & drink and house hold product markets, "you name it there's probably a use for it".

Their company Revive Eco are working on a process to extract and purify these oils. Mr Moore continues "The most exciting part for us is that they have all the same components as palm." They are both excited that they could potentially have a solution or a partial solution for the palm oil which has in recent months received some negative press.

They aim to have the process up and running by summer 2020. They are also representing Scotland and Northern Island in the Chivas Venture competition. The winners will be announced in Amsterdam in May, a share of a funding pot of £776.000 is available. The core of their business model will be to have the process running in and around major coffee drinking cites producing high quality oil in a local and sustainable way, they aim longer term to have this working in Rome, Paris & Berlin and any other heavy coffee drinking city's around the world.  

​Millions of people who struggle to get the recommend 8 hours sleep may have an answer or at least an aid to help them manage full days at work. The US army thought it was beneficial to work out and create an algorithm to recommend a suitable level of caffeine to get you through your working day, say the optimum level to function based on your levels of sleep + your daily routine. 

Though it wasn't initially intended for you and I and was put into development to enable the troops to operate at maximum efficiency, it will now be made available in the next few months in the form of an App to guide you as needed. The App will draw on data that had been collected over decades of sleep data.

Numerous studies show that reaction times in the sleep deprived can be up to 40 per cent slower than what would be considered normal, a comparison can be made against someone who would be over the drink driving limit, so being sleep deprived can be dangerous. A third of Britons sleep on average between 5-6 hours a night, for a sleep of 5 hours and a wake up time of 6am the App would recommend a cup of coffee at 7am and 9am to set you up for the rest of the day. 

If you slept for 6.8 hours for 5 consecutive nights then you'd require 200mg of caffeine or two filter coffees.

The Independent has reported on a 20 year study where almost 210,000 people were studied since 1976. Dr. Frank Hu joined the team in 1996 where he aided in the organizing of the data collected over the last 20 years. A huge 4.7 million person years of data was collected. Data on this scale meant that it took several generations of scientists to complete the study. Frank Hu asserts that the level of data collected here was necessary and useful due to the complexity of the beverage.
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He goes on to say that coffee's health benefits derive from not just a few of the compounds, but more likely the synergistic effects of many compounds, minerals and antioxidants. Many think of caffeine when they think of coffee yet many of the same benefits can be attained from both regular and decaf coffees. 

The study strongly indicated that regular drinkers of coffee typically lived longer and were less likely to fall to cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases and even suicide. Caution was given that not everyone responds the same way to coffee so drink in moderation and keep up with good healthy habits. 
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