While he worked in a lab as a PhD student, growing cells from berry plants that would later be used in pharmaceuticals or cosmetic manufacturing, Finnish researcher Lauri Reuter couldn’t stop thinking about something. “I always thought, what do these things taste like?” he says.

The other researchers–all from a pharmaceutical background–thought he was crazy to want to eat cell cultures. “You’re in a lab, you’re not supposed to put things in your mouth, obviously,” he says.

But the berry plant cells, along with being a source of complex biomolecules needed in manufacturing, are also nutritious. Reuter kept considering the idea, driven not just by curiosity but by the realization that in a world where traditional agriculture faces multiple environmental challenges, growing plant cells in a machine could be a useful way to produce food. Now, along with other researchers at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, he’s developing a prototype of a countertop vessel that could eventually grow edible plants cells in someone’s kitchen.

The small machine, called a bioreactor, would work like a Keurig coffee maker. Rather than a coffee pod, you’d insert a capsule with a small amount of plant cells that would start growing and multiplying, along with the minerals and nutrients the cells need to grow.

“You put in a pod, fill the tank with water, turn it on, and then it would start bubbling away,” he says. “You could harvest something like half a kilo of these plant cells in roughly a week. So it takes a bit longer than making a cup of coffee, but then again, if you would grow those berries in your backyard, it would take much longer, and the season would be only once a year. Now you can do it any day around the year, and in any place.”

The system could be used to grow plant cells, such as the arctic berries the lab has experimented with, that are difficult or impossible to otherwise cultivate. The arctic bramble, for example, produces only a single berry per plant, and is also becoming endangered. While the new machines can’t grow something that looks like a berry, they can grow a goo-like mixture of the plant’s cells that can provide valuable nutrition (the researchers are currently analyzing the nutritional profile in detail). While humans typically eat only a small range of plants–eight major crops, and some 20 fruits and vegetables–thousands of others could be eaten if they were easier to grow.

“I would argue that for most of our history, diets have been relatively diverse, but have narrowed recently,” Reuter says. In places where fresh food is particularly hard to access, the machines could provide a new source of a variety of nutrients. They could also expand the range of flavors possible in food; the researchers have also experimented with some plant cells, such as those from birch trees, that we normally wouldn’t eat.