So when you grind coffee oxidization and co2 start creeping out of the beans fairly instantly... we know this to be fact....

What If you stop that process. after grinding the coffee put it in a purged, pressurized, stainless steel holding bin. wouldn't that effectively halt the process?

envisioning something like this... someone who doesn't have a grinder, or has a grinder at home and their machine at work goes to their local roaster to fill the tube. have a fitting on one end of the pipe with a fitting for a co2 12gram. and on the other a valve to let the oxygen out... off the bottom of the "t" have a valve with a catch cup as an air lock. theoretically the grind left in the tub would stay fresh indefinitely and you take what you need out of the air lock.

Granted you can't do much to dial in the grind, but might hold the beans fresher, Not sure what the max pressure of tripclamp orings are, but I know you can run them up to at least 50psi without issue.

Ah crap, already been done, kinda

http://www.coffeefreshness.com/#anch_page3

Found this too

Storing roasted coffee in CO2

I just saw this today from la colombe

https://blog.lacolombe.com/2019/02/19/k ... fee-fresh/

Apparently a viable idea !

If your goal is just to stop oxidization any noble gas will do... hence their use of N2. Co2 is convenient for simplicity sake in packaging because coffee puts off its own. I'm wondering if you can halt the offgassing with enough back pressure. hence why I was thinking about pressurized CO2 chamber.

To be honest, beans would be a lot easier to manage as espresso grind would clog up the valves and possibly be blown out, beans would be easy to manage.

What would be (if any) benefit of using gasses like N or CO2, instead of just vacuuming, removing all air from the container?

Gasses tend to go toward the place of least concentration. So if you were to vacuum out the air it would intensify the bleeding of Co2 out of the beans until the pressure is equalized between the chamber volume and the beans(im guessing you could see this is you sealed beans in a vac bag, bag would fill with co2 from the beans. Vacuuming does remove most of the O2 but probably not all of it unless you get a 100% vac. VS displacement of the air with an inert gas pushes all of the o2 out of the chamber.

If there is any benefit to any of this, I don't know. just working off theory right now

hope you ARE aware of what illy has been up to for quite some time now?

Nope, only been at this a few weeks. But I would imagine they have some tricks up their sleeve to keep those ese pods "fresh" for months at a time

The Coffee Freshness system works as advertised and you do not have to go out and reinvent the wheel. Evacuating without also markedly lowering the temperature is only marginally effective.