Instant Coffee
Food · Drink · Food, Typed Supps
A genuine niacin source, and the coffee with the most acrylamide.
Stage by stage
- Read the units (The cup): These are per 100 g of dry granules — about fifty teaspoons, not one cup.
- Caffeine (Circulation): A 2 g teaspoon delivers around 70 mg, less than a double espresso.
- Niacin (Liver): Roasting converts trigonelline to nicotinic acid, so the vitamin is created rather than preserved.
- Acrylamide (Gut): A Maillard by-product, roughly double that of roast and ground, with no consistent human risk signal.
Timing
The caffeine behaves like any other coffee — around a five-hour half-life. Nothing about the instant format changes the timing.
Time to effect
- 30–60 min: Caffeine peak.
- Per cup: Roughly 70 mg caffeine and 0.5 mg niacin from a 2 g teaspoon.
Allergens
None of the fourteen major allergens. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.
Eating patterns
Fits: Vegan, Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Halal, Kosher, Keto, Gluten-free. Depends on the product: Low-FODMAP.
Satiety
Not scored: the satiety index is measured on 240 kcal servings, and nobody eats a 240 kcal serving of this. The question does not apply rather than the answer being unknown.
Environmental footprint
28.5 kg CO2e and 1571 litres of freshwater per kg, matched to "Coffee" in Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science 360.
Cost band
Pricey — roughly £20 per kg, as a band midpoint rather than a price.
Key nutrients
Nutrition per 100g
- Calories: 141
- Protein: 18g
- Carbohydrate: 3.6g
- of which sugars: 3.4g
- Fat: 0.3g
- Fibre: 20.6g
- Sodium: 61mg
Food vs. supplement
Coffee is one of the few drinks that supplies a vitamin the plant never made. The niacin in instant coffee is manufactured by the roaster out of trigonelline, which means the roast level changes the nutrition and not just the taste.
Kitchen tip
Divide every figure on this page by fifty to get a teaspoon. It is the single most useful arithmetic on the entry.
Common myth
“Instant coffee is stripped of everything good in real coffee.” In reality: It keeps most of the chlorogenic acids, and it has more niacin than brewed coffee because the extract is concentrated. The two real differences are aroma — freeze-drying cannot preserve the volatiles that make coffee smell like coffee — and acrylamide, which runs about double. Neither is what people usually mean when they say instant is stripped.
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