No, we have no plans to design or sell our own grinder. We already went down that path, putting about a million US dollars and a year and a half of R&D into designing our own large, flat-burr grinder, but we ultimately chose to abandon the project.

The biggest engineering hurdle was grind retention. While our prototype could achieve "grams-in equals grams-out" consistency, it struggled with "beans-in equals beans-out" freshness. Freshly ground coffee would push out the stale, retained grinds from the previous session—similar to what happens inside a Mythos grinder. We didn't fully understand how competitors elegantly solved this until taking apart a Weber EG-1, which uses replaceable Teflon wipers to clear the chamber.

Grinders are heavy, metal-dense machines. Shipping them by air is far too expensive, meaning they have to be shipped by boat to overseas warehouses or regional resellers. Going the reseller route means sacrificing a 40% margin right off the bat, which heavily inflates the retail price. Furthermore, relying on third-party distributors shifts your focus away from the end-user, and resellers are often anti-innovation—they just want a box they don't have to think about.

Companies like Niche and Kafatek managed to crack this code. They designed excellent grinders that aren't excessively heavy and sold them exclusively direct-to-consumer. The Niche Zero, in particular, offers spectacular success and an unbeatable value at 500 pounds for proper espresso-quality grinding.

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