Mixing Java and Tech, GIR is Building a More Intelligent Coffee Grinder

Samantha Rose says that “get it right” isn’t just part of her company’s name, it’s also the philosophy behind the products she puts out.

Rose is the CEO of GIR: Get It Right, a New York-based company that’s developed a smart coffee grinder that can warn users when their beans are getting stale, order new beans when they’re running low and even help users discover new roasts to try.

“This particular project, if I’m being perfectly honest, it snowballed a little,” Rose says. “Someone said grinder and I immediately started thinking, if no grinder existed, how would I build one from scratch? What would be the configuration, the components? What would make it really cool and fun?”

She says development started from the inside, effort was put into picking the right burrs and designing the way beans move through the grinder. Portability was also a factor.

But that isn’t what sets the grinder apart – rather it’s the built-in sensors that feed data through a learning algorithm to a smartphone app.

Users will also have to enter some information about the beans they’re using. It will be able to tell users when their beans are starting to get stale or to automatically order beans when they’re running out.

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“We can also use this to help recommend roasts that people might be interested in,” she says.

There are plans to work with small coffee roasters and to integrate the device with bean subscription services.

Rose and her team are currently raising money to fund manufacturing of the device, called the Voltaire, through a Kickstarter campaign. So far, the campaign has raised $86,000 of its $100,000 goal, with 19 days left to go.

This is GIR’s fourth crowdfunding campaign and it’s by far the most ambitious, GIR’s previous campaigns (all of which were very successful) were for silicone spatulas and lids.

“At the very outset we were imagining more complicated things than spatulas,” she says. “This is a much better embodiment of what we can do.”

Rose says she’s a big fan of Kickstarter.

“Well before I was a creator on Kickstarter, I was a backer,” she says. “I think that there’s an early-adopter mentality that gets a lot of traction on Kickstarter and I think that provides and environment where as a company, or as project or product creators, we can go outside the bounds of what might be immediately commercially successful. We can dip our toes in the water and see if it will be successful. That’s why I came to Kickstarter in the first place.”

If the campaign is successful, she says the next step will be to begin rolling out beta models of the Voltaire device in order to begin running data through the algorithm.

The crowdfunding campaign also includes a number of related pieces – like a coffee mug, a smart container for beans.

“It’s not just about the grinder,” Rose says. “It’s really about a holistic experience centered around really fresh beans and great ways to make fresh coffee.”