The Coffee Value Assessment: An Opportunity for Information Sharing | 25, Issue 22
Since 25’s last program spotlight on the Coffee Value Assessment (CVA),[1] we’ve made significant progress on the system.
LAUREL CARMICHAEL, SCA Publications Manager, provides an update on the CVA, with a focus on its capacity for information-sharing.
The CVA allows tasters to assess coffee from four points of view: physical, descriptive, affective, and extrinsic. The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) is preparing to adopt the first standards related to cupping (sample preparation, descriptive assessment, and affective assessment) later this year, officially replacing the 2004 SCA Cupping Form and Protocol. Meanwhile, a beta version of the extrinsic assessment—a brand-new way to capture information about a coffee—is now being tested by early adopters. Research is underway to update the physical assessment (formerly known as green grading). Finally, we’re beginning to draft a system standard, formalizing how different elements of the CVA can be used as a value discovery tool.
Quantifying the Value of Extrinsic Information
We’ve known for a long time that coffee drinkers and buyers value a coffee’s extrinsic attributes, or information about the coffee that’s not found in the beans themselves.[2] If extrinsic information weren’t important, retailers wouldn’t develop nice packaging, cafés wouldn’t think about the cups they use, we’d never ask how coffee was processed, and Fairtrade certifications wouldn’t influence consumer decisions. When we talk about transparency in the supply system, we’re talking about extrinsic information: what varieties are grown, what sustainability practices do farmers implement, and what prices are farmers paid for cherry or parchment?
Providing detailed extrinsic information about a coffee—such as sending captioned photos from the harvest, describing exactly which varieties grow in which areas of a farm, or recording data on all transactions in the supply chain—is a lot of work. The CVA Extrinsic Assessment is one of the first steps towards standardizing this kind of information and making it a more visible driver of value across the coffee system.[3]
Describing Coffee in More Accessible Ways
The CVA separates the descriptive and affective (liking) assessments for two reasons: first, to help cuppers describe coffee characteristics in more detail, and second, to try to ensure that this information can be more universally understood. Coffee tasters’ flavor vocabularies are always informed by their personal, geographic, and cultural contexts. The check-all-that-apply design of the descriptive assessment is designed to encourage every cupper to record sensory data according to basic flavor categories (such as nutty/cacao, fruity, or green/vegetative) and generalizable mouthfeel descriptors (such as rough, oily, or mouth drying). If you are astounded by how much a coffee’s flavor reminds you of feijoa (a fruit that’s endemic to South America and particularly beloved in New Zealand), there is still room to write that, but checking the “fruity” and “floral” boxes and ranking the acidity intensity as “medium” will make sure that a person who’s never tasted feijoa understands the essence or character of the coffee. If tasters describe the coffee as having different characteristics after it has been milled, shipped, or warehoused, this might provide insight into how its sensory profile changes over time (rather than simply reporting that its score has gone up or down).
Using Descriptive and Affective Assessments to Quantify Preference
Buyers and sellers mutually sharing information is key to building trust and adding value to coffee, especially when information about consuming markets is “accessible to and actionable” for producers.[4] Focus group activities conducted in Guatemala as part of our 2023 Equitable Value Distribution Survey identified that improved “access to information about coffee quality and market trends” is essential to achieving more equitable value distribution in the coffee industry. As a focus group participant stated, “With clear data and information, we can consolidate a stronger position as a producing community, producing regions, and producers [worldwide].”[5] While many well-meaning roasters (my past self included) do already communicate market trends back to producers, this information is often in the form of anecdotes that are hard to contextualize and quantify, and may even be contradictory. The assertion that “everyone wants funky coffees right now,” might be followed six months later by an observation that “everyone’s sick of funky processing.”
With cupping data recorded with the CVA, anyone can conduct a form of preference mapping, validating anecdotal observations about trends or preference with empirical evidence. By comparing their descriptive and affective forms for the same coffees, any taster (or group of tasters) can start to identify patterns in their own preferences. If a cupper can track that they consistently give high affective scores to coffees that they describe as having a “sour/fermented” flavor and aroma, then they have gathered quantitative evidence that they value this style of coffee. The CVA becomes even more powerful when different actors in the coffee supply system compare their descriptive and affective assessments of the same coffees: if multiple cuppers from different parts of the supply system all describe a coffee as “nutty” but give it vastly different affective scores, then this could lead to constructive conversations about market preference.
We see digital tools as an important step towards more widespread adoption and towards the CVA ultimately becoming more and more effective as a tool for gathering, mapping, and communicating information about coffee. Excitingly, the CVA can now be used on three digital platforms—Catador, Cropster, and Tastify (all of which can be used on smart phones)— with other tools already in development and others anticipated soon.
Where to From Here?
We hope that the CVA can become integrated into the very structure of coffee trading, incentivizing reciprocal (rather than asymmetrical) information sharing. As we look towards the full adoption of this new system, we are considering questions about the CVA’s practical benefits: What if partners in a coffee contract asked each other to fill out the descriptive assessment, ensuring that both parties had high-resolution data about the coffee’s character and what each party liked about it? When sellers send free samples to potential buyers (as is the industry norm), could they request that the recipient fill out the descriptive and affective forms, providing valuable information regardless of whether the samples result in a sale or not? If buyers consider the extrinsic information valuable or even essential, is there a way to formally acknowledge and compensate for the provision of this information?
While there are still barriers to access that need to be addressed, we believe that the more actors in the coffee system who use the CVA, the more useful and powerful it will become. We hope that the CVA becomes a tool that contributes to more nuanced conversations about value, and to a context of mutual information sharing.
LAUREL CARMICHAEL is the SCA’s Publications Manager.
References
[1] Jenn Rugolo, “Valuing Coffee: Evolving the SCA’s Cupping Protocol into a Coffee Value Assessment System,” 25, no. 18 (2022), https://sca.coffee/sca-news/25/issue-18/valuing-coffee-evolving-the-scas-cupping-protocol-into-a-coffee-value-assessment-system.
[2] Jenn Rugolo, “The Extraordinary Extrinsic,” 25, no. 20 (2023), https://sca.coffee/sca-news/25/issue-20/the-extraordinary-extrinsic; Charles Spence and Fabiana M. Carvalho, “The Coffee Drinking Experience: Product Extrinsic (Atmospheric) Influences on Taste and Choice,” Food Quality and Preference 80 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2019.103802.
[3] Editor’s note: While the term “supply chain” is commonly used, we advocate for the term “supply system,” as it implies a more interactive role between actors and acknowledges that interactions are not necessarily linear or chronological.
[4] Andrés Montenegro, “A Point of Tension: What We Know (and Think We Know) about Equitable Value Distribution,” 25, no. 21 (2024), https://sca.coffee/ sca-news/25/issue-21/a-point-of-tension-what-we-know-and-think-we-know-about-equitable-value-distribution; Specialty Coffee Association, Equitable Value Distribution Survey Findings (January 2024), https://sca.coffee/EDVReport2024.
[5] Specialty Coffee Association, Equitable Value Distribution Survey Findings.
We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of 25, Issue 22. This issue of 25 is made possible with the contributions of specialty coffee businesses who support the activities of the Specialty Coffee Association through its underwriting and sponsorship programs. Learn more about our underwriters here.