In casual conversation, friends Chris Pettazzoni, Keith Barnofski, and Andrew Brach talked about how wonderful peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwiches are. This is their traditional hangover cure. It was missing only one thing: a jolt of caffeine.
This led to the invention of STEEM. Each tablespoon has as much caffeine as a cup of coffee. CNN reports:
They put Barnofski's sous chef skills to work and devised a way to caffeinate peanut butter. Brach said they mixed green-coffee extract and natural agave sweetener into peanut butter. He said the caffeine gets extracted from the green coffee bean and mixes with the fat of the peanut butter.
"It's a slower release of energy," he said. "That way you don't get the sugar crash."
He said that two tablespoons of Steem is equal to two cups of coffee.
It look about two years to turn the concept into a jar of Steem ready for sale. He said they rented out a food processing facility at a community center in Greenfield, Mass., and since their launch in March 2014 they've sold nearly 6,000 jars.
-via David Thompson