The same coffee bean that was used to roast your morning cup of Joe could soon be used to make the headlamp on a new Ford F150.
In a new innovative partnership between Chicago-based McDonald's and Ford Motor Company, Ford plans to use coffee chaff—which is the dried skin of the coffee bean that naturally comes off during the roasting process—from McDonald's and turn it into material that can be used to create certain car parts.
The two companies said that by heating the coffee chaff to high temperatures and mixing it with plastic and other additives, the material can be used to make headlamp housings and other interior and under-the-hood components.
Using chaff will result in car parts that are about 20 percent lighter and require up to 25 percent less energy to create, the companies said Wednesday.
McDonald's said it will direct a significant portion of its coffee chaff in North America to Fordto make the new car parts.
“McDonald’s commitment to innovation was impressive to us and matched our own forward-thinking vision and action for sustainability,” Debbie Mielewski, Ford senior technical leader, sustainability and emerging materials research team, said in a statement. “This has been a priority for Ford for over 20 years, and this is an example of jump starting the closed-loop economy, where different industries work together and exchange materials that otherwise would be side or waste products.”
Ford and McDonald's said they both plan to continue collaborating on ways to use waste as a resource.
In some ways, 2019 has been the year of new technology for McDonald's. Earlier this year, it acquired Apprente, a Mountain View-based startup that’s created voice-based platforms for conversational ordering. McDonald’s has been testing Apprente at some of its restaurants and says the technology is expected to create faster, simpler and more accurate orders at the drive thru window. And it also paid more than $300 million to acquire Dynamic Yield, a tech company that helps brands create customized drive thru menus.
This year McDonald’s also opened the McD Tech Labs, a technology lab in Silicon Valley.
