- 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 coffee as part of her ‘Brew_Lab’ project
- The project reflects on how climate change could affect the availability and composition of coffee
A designer working with experts from NASA and the Royal Botanical Society of the United Kingdom has produced a coffee that tastes as if it were grown on Mars a hundred years from now.
Red Planet-flavored Mars 2126 Coffee, an “edible aroma” added to a regular cup of coffee, is a product of Brew_Lab, a project by industrial designer Sarah Ali. The project centers on 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 degree exhibition which runs until June 21.
“This is very much a climate futures project,” Ali told TechRadar, “and the way I got to Mars was through the fact that if we continue doing what we do now, our future 100 years from now might be that the Earth is not able to facilitate all the things that we need.”
“It’s a little speculative,” he continued, “but what I found really interesting was that people at NASA were already testing what food and drinks would be like on Mars. There’s a lot of investment in that space.”
The successors of Arabica
As well as giving passers-by the chance to try a cup of Martian clay from the year 2126, the project also includes an edible aroma designed to predict the taste of coffee grown in Sierra Leone in 2080. This uses the revived species of coffee bean stenophylla, which is more resistant to climate change than the industry-leading Arabica bean.
The third and final flavor, Brazil 2027, is used to emphasize the fragility of the Arabica bean, with crop yields expected to drop by up to 80% by 2050 (via University of Florida).
To design the aroma profiles of each coffee, Ali used machine learning models fed with data from NASA’s Dr. Gioia Massa and Kew Gardens’ Dr. Aaron Davis, a world-leading coffee expert.
“Dr. Davis has studied 127 different species of coffee, of which only 7 to 12 are likely to survive in our future,” adds Ali. Brew_Lab uses rare and hardy racemosa beans for its Martian brew, and Ali explained that NASA research into agriculture allowed it to take into account the effect of gravity on our perception of flavor in 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 can we think about things differently, to avoid that future or prepare for it?”
Still, it could be a few years until the best coffee makers add a “Martian” setting.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to receive news, reviews and opinions from our experts in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp also.
