Belgian coffee roaster Ray & Jules raises crowdfunding to expand in Europe

Ray & Jules has turned its solar-roasting pitch into a fast-moving capital raise, pulling in €1.3 million through crowdfunding and clearing its original €1 million goal by 30 percent. The Belgian coffee brand now wants to use that money to push deeper across Belgium and into the Netherlands, betting that sustainability can be more than a branding angle.

The company, which launched as a brand in December 2019, built its reputation on a patented 100 percent solar-powered slow-roasting system that it says uses three times less energy than traditional gas roasting. Founder Koen Bosmans and his engineering team began the project after confronting the energy intensity of conventional batch roasters, then built a prototype after the idea was initially dismissed as too ambitious. Ray & Jules says that early skepticism forced a prototype-first path and eventually led to what it calls the world’s first industrial coffee roaster running on solar energy.

That technical story has already translated into a real coffee business. World Coffee Portal says Ray & Jules has tens of thousands of subscribers on its direct-to-consumer delivery platform and generates about €2 million in annual revenue, with most of that still coming from Belgium. The brand’s next move is a new roastery near Leuven, part of a broader expansion plan aimed at Benelux customers who want traceable, lower-energy coffee without giving up the subscription convenience that has powered the brand so far.

The crowdfunding itself has become part of the growth signal. The campaign, run through Broccoli, reportedly passed €1 million in less than 24 hours before the target was raised to €1.5 million. Ray & Jules says about 70 percent of the fresh capital will go to marketing, a detail that suggests the company is past the proof-of-concept stage and is now trying to turn its brand story into a bigger retail and subscriber engine.

That is where the real test sits. Ray & Jules and its sister cleantech company CEE say the business was built to show sustainability and profitability can coexist, and CEE says the roasting technology has already been extended into cocoa and malt partnerships. For coffee, the question is no longer whether the technology is novel. It is whether enough customers in Belgium and the Netherlands will buy into solar roasting as a reason to subscribe, stay loyal, and make the expansion pay.