Vitamins taste sour or bitter. Minerals taste of metal. Plant extracts taste of plants. Stir them into coffee as they are and the cup tells you at once. Yet a Fairytale + Grey coffee tastes of coffee. The reason is a technique food science has used for decades, and it is the quiet engine of every formula we make.
What it is
Microencapsulation wraps tiny particles of an ingredient, the core, in a thin shell, the wall. The particles are microscopic, typically a few micrometers to a fraction of a millimeter across. The wall is a food material such as a starch, a gum or a protein, chosen to hold the core in and keep the outside world out.
How it is made
The most common method in food is spray drying. The core is dispersed in a solution of the wall material, the mixture is sprayed as a fine mist into warm air, the water evaporates in moments, and what is left are dry particles, each a little capsule. Other methods coat particles in a fluidized bed of air, or let the wall material gather around droplets of the core.
What it does for a formula
It keeps the taste in. Sour, bitter and metallic notes stay inside the wall, so they do not reach your tongue.
It keeps the world out. Oxygen, light and moisture are what make vitamins degrade over time; the wall stands between them and the core while the coffee sits in its bag.
It keeps ingredients apart. Some actives react with each other or with the coffee itself; separately encapsulated, they meet only in the cup.
And it keeps the coffee a coffee: encapsulated powders flow and mix more evenly than raw ones, and the cup is left to taste of what it is.
What we will tell you
Encapsulation is only as good as what reaches the cup. That is why each formula’s page gives its full list of ingredients, the wall materials included, and its nutrition declaration per 100 ml of coffee as brewed: the amounts you actually drink, not the amounts that went into the bag.