Beanless coffee startup Atomo raises $40M, begins online sales

I'll need to try it. I'm not a great coffee snob, but I do know the difference between a good bean and a bad bean. I'll admit that I'd slightly miss the variability that you can get with a natural product, but most people most days just want a cup of decent-tasting, caffeinated black water. (Often diluted with milk, and further modified with other chemicals so that it tastes like something other than coffee.) That's fine, just as there's a difference between fine wines and "table wines".

I'm on the fence about the environmental benefits. It comes at a cost to poor farmers -- but farmers who are massively abused. This is $5 for a can of coffee that is hopefully better than the $1 I can get at 7/11, for which that farmer would earn perhaps $.02.

If Atomo were to make a side business in also making the "fine wine" equivalent for coffee, paying farmers much more per pound to make the fanciest coffees, I'd feel more at ease about the whole thing.