On April 1, Korea University Sejong Campus held an opening ceremony for the CSI Living Lab Place at Science and Technology Building 1, marking the commencement of its official operations for healthy coffee research.

The CSI Living Lab Place is a demonstration research facility jointly established by the Coffee Science Innovation Research Center (CSI-RC) and the Bio-Clock-based Anti-Aging Convergence Leading Research Center (BCA2-RLRC), led by Director and Professor Baek Seungpil. Designed as a participatory space, it allows consumers to directly experience products developed by researchers and provide real-time feedback. This "Living Lab" model moves beyond traditional researcher-centered development, focusing instead on continuous improvement driven by user experience.

The facility is scheduled to operate three days a week (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday) during the afternoon. Through ongoing participant recruitment and feedback collection, the research team aims to validate and refine their findings. Starting in 2026, the team plans to develop a differentiated healthy coffee model that reduces the burden of caffeine while enhancing health-beneficial components. This will be achieved by utilizing natural caffeine to regulate arousal levels and reinterpreting functional food ingredients.

The opening of this Living Lab Place is the result of a strategic partnership between CSI-RC, which focuses on creating a healthy coffee industry through research into arousal-controlled coffee, non-caffeine substitutes, and functional beverages, and BCA2-RLRC, which conducts anti-aging research based on biological clock principles. Research will specifically center on healthy coffee concepts integrated with chronobiology-based health enhancement.

Participants will take part in the product improvement process by sharing their opinions after experiencing the coffee. The goal is to refine the concept of functional healthy coffee based on consumer experience and to establish an open research platform co-created by researchers and consumers.

CSI-RC and BCA2-RLRC plan to continue their collaboration to develop products reflecting health-promotion principles rooted in chronobiology and anti-aging research. By sharing consumer feedback derived from the Living Lab through regular exchanges, the centers intend to develop a healthy coffee brand with industrial competitiveness and contribute to the formation of a new coffee culture based on industry-academic-research cooperation