Datum: the coffee machine that dials itself in by scanning your bag

The brand puts it in a single line. "Scan your coffee once, and brew it exactly as intended," says datum.coffee. Every bag carries the roaster's ideal recipe, you scan it, and the two devices sort out the rest: grind, dose, temperature, pressure, flow.

Two bits of engineering are worth quoting.

The grinder stays in conversation with the machine mid-extraction. If flow runs too fast or too slow, the machine sends a correction back to the grinder for the next shot, which Datum calls Grind-by-Sync. Tamping is handled by a hydraulic piston inside the group head at roughly 20 kg of pressure, per the profile Kaffeemacher published on 27 June 2026. Those are manufacturer figures relayed by the trade press, not an independent measurement.

The founders sum up their starting point with a question every portafilter owner knows, quoted in that same piece: why do you have to throw away several espressos before the grind is finally right?

The word Datum keeps repeating is "open". The idea is an open, connected coffee platform, not locked to one brand. Roasters register their own recipes on the platform, and you keep buying whatever beans you want. That's the split with the closed barcode ecosystems most people already know, Nespresso Vertuo being the obvious one, where the code only reads on the manufacturer's own pods.

And that's the bet, which is far from won. An open platform is worth exactly as many roasters as bother to upload a recipe to it. If they don't show up, what's left is an expensive machine you dial in by hand.

The names are close enough that search results already mix them up. The Wendougee Data S is a professional dual-boiler machine, sold today through several specialty retailers, whose E-bar app monitors extraction and lets you shape the pressure profile by hand. Different brand, different country, different mechanism. And it's on shelves, which Datum isn't.

Datum's pricing has moved since the first June write-ups. According to Yanko Design on 21 August 2026, the machine and grinder set is announced at €1,199 early bird and €1,499 standard, with a Kickstarter targeted for late 2026 and delivery hoped for 2027. Those figures come from datum.coffee.

What's missing is worth stating plainly. There's no firm ship date, no commitment on retail availability or shipping in any specific market, and a crowdfunding model that has a long history of slipping. A pre-order figure isn't a retail price, and I'd treat it that way until the campaign actually opens.

Nothing on the consumer market does what Datum promises. Plenty of machines take instructions from a phone, though, which is honestly a different thing.

The PHILIPS machine à café grain 5500, 20 boissons chaudes & glacées, LatteGo | Carafe LatteGo facile à nettoyer, SilentBrew 40% plus silencieux, QuickStart, App HomeID, Expresso broyeur Noir (EP5544/50) is probably the most visible of them, with the HomeID app and the LatteGo carafe, around €559 as listed on Amazon.fr on 27/08/2026. The De'Longhi Rivelia EXAM440.35.B - Perfetto Machine à Café Automatique, Réservoir à Grains Interchangeable plays a different card, its swappable bean hoppers letting you jump between two coffees without emptying anything, roughly €525 in the same check. Further up, the Melitta Barista T Smart Argent, Machine à Café à Grain avec Broyeur, Connectée, Système One Touch, Double bac à grains, 18 spécialités de café, Mode 1 à 2 Tasses, Écran Couleur, Réservoir à lait and its twin bean hoppers sit near €936.

None of them scans anything. And none touches what actually decides the cup: grind, dose, and the real extraction pressure, around 9 bar.

Hall 5.2, early September. That's when we find out whether the Datum coffee machine's scan holds up away from the stand.