N.S. startup has surprising use for used coffee grounds

You don't reach in your coffee machine and eat a bunch of coffee grounds. It doesn't look and feel like food, but that then became the mission. Can I transform this into something that makes a wonderful food ingredient and utilize all those nutrients that are going to waste? I didn't want to be a traditional engineer, so I spent a summer working at a startup company here in Halifax. And as the intern, they gave me a lot of the jobs that other people didn't want, such as maintaining this big fancy coffee machine we had. So big touch screen, you could pick whatever kind of coffee you wanted. It was automatically dumping these spent grounds in this receptacle. And we were just producing mountains of spent coffee. It really planted a seed where I thought, wow, there must be a lot of this stuff out there, and there has to be something better we can do with it. There are companies all over the world that are doing things with spent coffee. And we tried many of those. We grew mushrooms, we made composites, we made coffee tables, we did all kinds of stuff. But in the end, we wanted to have the greatest impact, which was going to come through something people use every day. Food. Incidentally, we just started realizing, wow, it's actually a lot like cocoa. And then when we looked at it chemically, when we got started getting it measured and tested, we're like, actually, the ratio of fat and fiber and protein They're actually quite similar, and what we're seeing is Canadian food manufacturers are really struggling. They want to keep selling their chocolate SKUs, but they're making no money on these products anymore. Cocoa powder has simply gotten too expensive, so that then became the mission. Maybe we can complement cocoa powder, help food manufacturers improve their bottom line, and keep selling the chocolate products that their customers love.