The coffee tasted great this morning. Of course, it usually does. For billions of people, coffee is a daily habit.  And yet it has only been part of our lives for a few centuries. Coffee began its triumphal conquest of the planet in the 15th century, expanding outward from Saudi Arabia, where it was grown after having been discovered in Ethiopia. To make its way to our mugs today, coffee travelled over the centuries across the Middle East to Turkey and then to Europe through Italy, arriving in England and, from there, over to the New World.  Today, it is mainly grown in South America.  That’s quite a journey for a small, dark and aromatic bean with a bitter taste.

Of course, not everyone loves coffee – some of us prefer a nice hot chocolate. Chocolate is made from cocoa, the seed of a tree that originally grew only in South America. Known to Indigenous civilizations for millennia, cocoa seeds and the powder made from them (called cacahuatl in Nahuatl, one of the predominant languages in pre-Columbian Central America) were valued for their invigorating qualities and literally worth their weight in gold. Chocolate was introduced to the Spanish through their interactions with the Aztecs and then made its way to Europe and Africa, where it is primarily grown today.  In a sense, it took a similar trip to coffee, but in the opposite direction. Cocoa is another widely travelled plant.

At this point, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that tea is another big traveller. From its origins in the foothills of China’s mountainous Szechuan region, this drink toured the world. Hitching a ride with merchants from Central Asia, it reached the Middle East and moved from there to Europe and on to North America. Independently, thanks to Buddhist monks, tea also arrived in Japan. The British imported massive quantities of the stuff, as did the Russians. In both empires, it became a popular drink, shared among families and friends. And yet despite its rapid adoption, Europeans were unfamiliar with tea before about the 18th century

When you sip your coffee or tea, possibly with a nice piece of chocolate, thank the molecules in these plants that have travelled so far to make your day better.

Spices, tobacco, opium, cannabis and even medicinal Chinese rhubarb – thousands of plants have travelled around the world and moved to new continents through human adoption.  For edible plants like potatoes, tomatoes and corn (all originally from the Americas), the interest of the people who adopted them is easy to understand.  But the passion for plant products such as coffee, cocoa and tea is more complicated. Our interest in them is due to their stimulating properties.  And those properties stem from molecules that change our physiology in a way that seems desirable and pleasing, encouraging us to adopt them.  Consuming these molecules becomes a habit and, for some, a need. Our bodies are directly influenced by plant molecules because, since the dawn of time, our ancestors lived in contact with them. Our interaction with plant molecules is complex and not always conscious. When you sip your coffee or tea, possibly with a nice piece of chocolate, thank the molecules in these plants that have travelled so far to make your day better.

Today, thanks to the unique process Aplantex has developed to produce certified molecules of high commercial interest, access to these precious molecules no longer requires a convoluted supply chain. The key to this green biotechnology process for high-performance, sustainable phytochemicals is the continuous production of plant biomass using photosynthetic phytoreplicators in a controlled environment – right here in Québec. This abundant biomass is then dried, followed by extraction, fractionation and purification processes to isolate the specific molecules that are essential to many products used in the pharmaceutical, cosmetics and agrifood industries.

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