By Kevin Whalen
What’s the best coffee? It’s the coffee you like, prepared the way you like.
The coffee industry is a multi-billion dollar business worldwide, and billions are spent defining, measuring and enforcing quality standards. Those standards have a huge impact on pricing,both at the commodity level 1 and in the specialty coffee world 2 .
The challenge is that sometimes the finest, most expensive, most praised coffee . . . .just isn’t what I like. Maybe partly because of the roast, partly because of the flavor notes, but my non-expert palate gives it the thumbs down. It’s like when someone shares certain expensive cheeses (that I can smell as I’m parking my car a block away), and I’m sorry, I’m sure you love them and went to a lot of effort, but . . . . no, not for me.
All this reminded me of when I was at World of Coffee ‘26 in San Diego last April. I went to a lecture titled, “AI Prediction of Consumer Liking and Expert Quality Assessment of Coffee from Sensory Data,” the title of which told me these were scientists, not marketing people.
Everything is AI these days, but what really interested me was the “consumer liking” (which is necessarily subjective) and the expert quality assessment (which has to be as objective as possible). Admittedly, I was totally geeking out on a lot of this, but I won’t go through everything.
The speaker was Jean-Xavier Guinard Ph.D. from the University of California-Davis. He went through the research process and data, but the conclusions I found most intriguing were:
● The expert quality ratings tended to cluster together (which is encouraging, since it should be an objective process).
● The consumer liking had multiple clusters, including some preferences for darker roasts. For many experts, dark roasts all taste the same (bad) and mask defects, which I’m sure is true to some extent, but I still like them.
● Some consumer liking and expert quality assessments clustered together (so people did like some high quality coffee), but consumer liking did not correlate as tightly with quality as I’m sure the industry would prefer.
Quality assessment strives to be objective, and the hope is quality is something of a proxy for what consumers like (but consumers like what they like, so it’s not a perfect correlation).
1 For commodity coffee, see the ICE C Contract world with quality standards and geographical premiums and discounts 2 Specialty coffee has many distribution methods and also competitions like Cup of Excellence.
The challenge is deciding how much to pay for the beans, and everyone in the supply chain from the farmer to the final seller wants to receive as much as possible.
That’s where we come in. Farmer to Farmer pays above market prices, partly because it’s the right thing to do in support of a living wage and partly because we think our coffee is great. Like most small operations, we don’t go through the extra steps to get any additional certifications beyond organic, but we know (and our customers agree) Farmer to Farmer sells good coffee. But we still have a responsibility to know what we’re selling. Farmer to Farmer has the coffee from each farmer assessed each season, and the coffee team reviews those and addresses any questions or issues.
We know our farmers work so hard all year round, but especially at harvest time and processing time. While larger growers and processors will use expensive optical scanners to filter out damaged coffee beans, our farmers painstakingly sort through their hundreds of pounds of green coffee by hand. We can see the results of their efforts, and we’re proud to partner with these farmers and sell their coffee.
So back to where I started: it’s what you like that counts. But if there are two coffees you are happy with, and one of them is organically grown and traceable back to real people that we meet every year, then keep buying Farmer to Farmer!
Next up for me: Florence, Italy! I’m taking a two-day green coffee class, part of the Coffee Sustainability Diploma from the Specialty Coffee Association (yes, this class is offered in the US, but I’ve never been to Florence, and I ain’t getting any younger!).
More on coffee quality assessment.
Yes, a (brief) bonus section if you’re interested in coffee quality evaluations or just having trouble falling asleep!
The Specialty Coffee Association introduced quality evaluation standards to distinguish high quality coffee from coffee sold on commodity markets. The Second Wave of coffee brought more attention to details, including quality and origin, so a standardized approach was needed.
The previous measuring stick was the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s 3 Green Arabica Coffee Assessment System, and it focused on the objective quality - what do the green beans look like, what is the water content and activity, are there defects and what types and how many, etc. If there were any Category 1 or more than 5 Category 2 defects in a 350 gram sample, it couldn’t be classified or marketed as specialty coffee under this assessment system (specialty coffee designation should command a higher price, although whether it’s worth the extra effort isn’t always clear for the farmers).
3 Specialty Coffee Association of America merged with Specially Coffee Association of Europe in 2017
Most people’s eyes glaze over when we talk about coffee defects, but if you’re interested, check out Cafe Imports’ Coffee Is training series (it’s free, defects are covered in module 5, Coffee Is a Science). For defects, some common Category 1 defects are things like severe insect damage, overripe beans, mold, foreign matter - where a single defective bean can make a whole pot taste off. Category 2 defects are less severe and often stem from processing problems or minor insect damage.
Getting through the physical coffee bean evaluation was just the first step in this system, as coffee could only be “specialty” if the “cupping” score was 80 or higher on a 100 point scale.
While there was a detailed process for the cupping scores, it became apparent that the process allowed some subjective judgment to affect evaluations. Too much good coffee was getting excluded from the specialty designation.
This earlier evaluation system ignored that some people still preferred coffee that didn’t meet “specialty” standards. In some cases, subjective preferences by evaluators entered into evaluations, and it became apparent that “good” was heavily skewed toward what western markets preferred (after all, humans can only strive for objectivity). While the system worked very well to distinguish specialty from commodity coffee, it started to show limitations as the industry became more complex and coffee consumption became more prevalent around the world, including in coffee-producing countries.
In response, the SCA introduced the updated Coffee Value Assessment (CVA), which is intended to be a much more holistic evaluation system and which provides more information for buyers beyond just a final cupping score. It still uses the basic physical assessment similar to the older system, but now the evaluation does not hinge on a single score. The new CVA adds in:
● descriptive assessment (aroma, flavor, texture in objective terms)
● affective assessment (according to the evaluator or, maybe more importantly, the preferences of the market they are evaluating for, maybe even troglodytes like me who like dark roasts). This is important because separating the affective assessment is intended to solve the problem of conflating “what did you taste” and “how did you like it” in a single score, as the previous system had done.
● extrinsic assessment (certifications, traceability, etc. - for me, I like what I like, but I also want and am willing to pay for organically-grown coffee from farmers that were treated fairly by buyers like Farmer to Farmer).
