Rishabh Khaneja is the founder and CEO of BrewRenew, a company repurposing coffee grounds into sustainable consumer products with a mission for a greener planet.
ABOUT BREW RENEW
Brew Renew is a start-up that upcycles waste coffee grounds that are discarded in cafes to make vegan, eco-friendly, and sustainable personal and home care products.
ABOUT RISHABH KHANEJA
Rishabh was born in Rewari, Haryana but because of his father’s transferable job, he got the chance to live across different cities in India. He now lives in Jaipur. Rishabh completed his Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in economics from Mithibai College in 2017.
Being a photographer and writer, Rishabh wanted to explore his creative side. He got the opportunity to nurture his creativity when he traveled across Spiti, Ladakh, and Zanskar on his bike alone for 3 months. After coming back from the trip, he sold some of his photographs as prints to people all over the country. Currently, Rishabh is working on Brew Renew and also writing a book about his travel experiences.
INSPIRATION
Rishabh had been consuming instant coffee throughout his life but 3 years ago, a friend introduced him to actual specialty coffee. He developed a passion for brewing coffee and experimenting with different metrics such as temperature and quality of coffee to make the perfect cup. However, from the beginning, Rishabh was conscious of the need to recycle coffee grounds.
Initially, he used to use them in his home garden but later on, found several other uses for them like making body scrub and face scrub out of them and also using them as an odorizer at home. While Rishabh was in Spiti on a trip, he volunteered at a cafe for a month, and over there he felt a bit helpless as he didn’t know what to do with all the coffee grounds that were left to waste every day. As Rishabh had other chores to take care of, he never seriously thought of the coffee grounds being wasted.
One day, while having his daily cup of morning coffee, it suddenly hit Rishabh how much coffee grounds must be wasted in cafes all across the world. This realization caused a very strong sinking feeling within him. He instantly started researching and found out that around the world 18 million tonnes of wet, waste coffee grounds are sent to landfills every year where they produce the potent methane gas responsible for global warming. He spent the next 12 hours researching on Google, Youtube, Wikipedia, and google scholar about various potential uses of coffee grounds.
As Rishabh continued his research, his worries changed to excitement upon discovering that coffee grounds have a ton of use cases. He realized that there is definitely scope for a circular economy around waste coffee grounds as nature already had instilled the perfect use cases and nutritional profile in the coffee grounds. He decided that he would do something about this issue and on the same day Brew Renew was born.
AFTER IDEA GENERATION: WHAT’S NEXT?
After his excitement upon finding the many different use cases of coffee grounds melted down, he realized the scale of this problem and the complexities of solving it. He took some time to himself to craft a solution. He spent the next few days visiting cafes to understand what they do with the coffee ground and all of them reported that they dispose them off at the end of the day. At one such cafe, he took the courage to ask them if they could give him the coffee grounds. They happily agreed and he bought their entire garbage bag home.
The garbage bag was a mixture of napkins, sugar packets, and some dry waste, he sorted the garbage at his home and separated the coffee grounds from the other waste products. He then spent the next few days drying out the coffee grounds and simply just observing them. He called some skin care products and candle products makers in Jaipur and asked them if they could partner with him to make products out of used coffee grounds. They all agreed and the very next day, he met them and supplied his coffee grounds to them.
On the other hand, he finalized the name, Brew Renew for his startup and bought the domain, and started working on the website and other social media channels. It’s been a month since Rishabh thought of the idea. The products are still in the development stage and on the same side, he is working on building a visual brand identity for his brand. As Rishabh has never been to business school, he also spent a lot of time on youtube trying to learn the business language and concepts. Rishabh can’t wait to launch Brew Renew to the world soon.
ONE MESSAGE RISHABH HAS FOR THE YOUTH
To achieve success it is important to understand that idea sounds great in your head and might make you feel that you’ve finally found something exciting, but the true value of the idea comes from executing it. Start executing even before the idea is fully formed. Action leads to more motivation and not the other way around. So, believe in yourself more than you believe in your idea, and just get started.
