Conversations Unplugged
with Melanie Avalon
After roughly 400 podcast episodes exploring health, fasting, and longevity, Melanie Avalon has turned one of her own daily rituals into her newest project: coffee. Her recently launched Glow Coffee was designed around a specific goal: preserve more of coffee’s naturally occurring antioxidants while creating a product she felt confident drinking herself. In this conversation with STEMREGEN Founder and Chief Science Officer Christian Drapeau, Melanie explores what goes into building a cleaner cup of coffee, how roasting changes the bean, and why one of the world’s most familiar rituals may still have plenty of room for innovation.
Melanie Avalon
Melanie says Glow Coffee begins with organically grown beans from a female-led initiative in Colombia. Once the beans reach the roasting facility in Miami, they are tested for 90 different compounds before being roasted. One of her priorities was preserving chlorogenic acid, which she describes as coffee’s primary antioxidant. That led to a light-to-medium roast designed to find a balance between a flavor most coffee drinkers would enjoy and preserving more of what naturally exists in the bean.
The conversation quickly turns into an experiment in what coffee could become next. Christian shares his past experience working with unroasted green coffee beans, describing a dramatically different drink with a mild, earthy taste and a tea-like appearance. He also raises questions about how coffee, caffeine, and stem cell biology might intersect, while making clear that he has not yet investigated that connection. For Melanie, whose work has long centered on researching ways to “up-level” everyday health, the possibility immediately opens another avenue to explore.
Coffee is only one piece of Melanie’s growing portfolio. Alongside her podcasts, she has developed an EMF-free air tube line and supplements, and she is now working on a dating app built around dietary preferences. But coffee has something those other projects do not: a ritual already woven into millions of people’s mornings. Christian sees that familiarity as an opportunity to rethink what else a daily cup could offer. By the end of the conversation, the two are already trading ideas for what they might create next, proving that sometimes innovation starts with something as ordinary as the drink already sitting beside you.
