Flavourtech touts technology to make instant coffee taste fresher

Shelf-stable coffee has a blunt new test: taste enough like the café to win the occasion. Flavourtech is betting that the answer lies in aroma recovery, extraction and evaporation systems that help instant and RTD coffee keep more of the bean’s natural character while staying convenient on the shelf.

That pitch lands in a market where convenience no longer excuses flat flavor. One forecast put global RTD coffee at $26.2 billion in 2024 and $52.5 billion by 2034, while the National Coffee Association said 47% of American adults had specialty coffee in the past day on June 2, 2025, compared with 42% for traditional coffee. By June 17, 2025, specialty coffee consumption had reached 46% in the past day, up 84% since 2011, a sign that drinkers are paying closer attention to quality cues even when they are not pulling espresso shots at home.

Flavourtech’s answer is built around the Spinning Cone Column, or SCC, a system the company says first gained traction in wine before spreading into coffee. In coffee, Flavourtech says the SCC is used for aroma recovery during instant coffee production and for simultaneous flavour and soluble-solids extraction in RTD beverages, the part of the process that can make a canned or bottled coffee taste fuller rather than cooked.

The company has been tying that technology to coffee for years. Flavourtech says Café Outspan Vietnam, a subsidiary of Olam International, installed SCC technology in 2008 for aroma recovery from coffee extracts. The company also said in 2021 that FreshFood’s plant was the first system it installed in the coffee industry, and that FreshFood used the SCC to make full-flavoured instant coffee.

The broader Flavourtech story is rooted in Australia. The company says founder Andrew Craig helped develop the SCC in the late 1970s and commercialised it from Griffith, Australia. That history matters now because the company is no longer selling a single piece of equipment so much as a way for brands to protect sensory quality as they scale into RTD coffee, premium iced tea and instant formats.

Flavourtech says its Integrated Extraction System combines wet milling, the SCC, the Rotating Disc Column and Centritherm evaporation to produce premium RTD and instant coffee and tea products. The company says the Rotating Disc Column allows continuous high-temperature extraction of coffee slurry at temperatures up to 200C, giving brands another way to build concentrates and soluble products without surrendering flavor.

Euromonitor has noted that RTD coffee sales in 2025 were supported by modern lifestyles and healthier variants such as lactose-free and reduced-sugar lines. That is the pressure Flavourtech is responding to: not just making coffee that is easier to grab, but making grab-and-go coffee taste convincing enough that it can steal an afternoon coffee run from the café.