- A designer working with NASA and agricultural experts has created a coffee that tastes like it was grown on Mars
- Masters student Sarah Ali created the cafe as part of her “Brew_Lab” project
- The project considers how climate change could affect the availability and composition of coffee.
A designer working with experts from NASA and the UK’s Royal Botanical Society has produced coffee that tastes like it was grown on Mars a hundred years ago.
Mars 2126 Red Planet-flavored coffee – an “edible scent” added to a regular cup of coffee – is a product of Brew_Lab, a project by industrial designer Sarah Ali. The project centers around a futuristic vending machine that brews coffee on three different dates in the future, based on climate projections.
Ali, 35, produced Brew_Lab to conclude his MA in Material Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and exhibited the project at Milan Design Week in April 2026, as well as at the CSM diploma exhibition which runs until June 21.
“A lot of this is a climate future project,” Ali told TechRadar, “and the way I got to Mars was because if we continue to do what we’re doing now, our future 100 years from now might be that Earth won’t be able to facilitate everything we need.”
“It’s a little speculative,” she continued, “but what I thought was really cool was that people at NASA were already testing what food and drink would be like on Mars. There’s a lot of investment in this space.”
The successors of Arabica
As well as offering passersby the chance to try a cup of Martian mud from 2126, the project also includes an edible flavor designed to predict the taste of coffee grown in Sierra Leone in 2080. This uses the resurrected Stenophylla coffee bean species, which is more resilient to climate change than the industry-leading arabica bean.
The third and final flavor, Brazil 2027, is used to highlight the fragility of the Arabica bean, whose yields are expected to drop by up to 80% by 2050 (via University of Florida).
To design each coffee’s flavor profiles, Ali used machine learning models powered by data from NASA’s Dr Gioia Massa and Kew Gardens’ Dr Aaron Davis, a global coffee expert.
“Dr Davis studied 127 different coffee species, of which only 7 to 12 are likely to survive into our future,” adds Ali. Brew_Lab uses rare, hardy racemosa beans for its Martian brew, and Ali explained that NASA’s research into agriculture allowed him to take into account the effect of gravity on our perception of the taste of the final product.
“I thought about Mars because it’s a very extreme scenario,” Ali said, “and extreme scenarios allow us to really understand what’s happening. How to think about things differently, to avoid this future or prepare for it.”
Still, it may be a few more years before the best coffee makers add a “Martian” setting.
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp Also.
