LEARNING FROM THE FIELD: How Farm Labor Research Shaped the SCA’s Understanding of Specialty Coffee | 25, Issue 25
PETER GIULIANO, SCA Senior Advisor of Science Communication, shares insights from research into the perspectives of coffee farm workers, and how this research has shaped knowledge building at the SCA.
The great thing about knowledge building is that, sometimes, you wind up learning more than you intended to in the first place. And this is exactly what happened to us. I’ll explain.
In 2018, a group of sustainability-focused organizations identified a gap in our knowledge. Though the role of the “producer,” i.e. the farm owner, was well understood, the role of the farm worker—those who do much of the hard work of coffee farming—was not. This gap presents a great risk to coffee; farms must remain appealing places to work or else the crucial tasks of picking, pruning, fertilizing, and cultivating will remain undone. With this in mind, several organizations—Rainforest Alliance, Conservation International, Solidaridad, and the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA)—supported a project to research the role of labor on specialty coffee farms, and how it differs from non-specialty coffee farms.
We found the right researcher to work with—Professor Carlos Carpio, an agricultural economist with broad experience in coffee. Carlos assembled a team of researchers at Texas Tech University and Zamorano University and embarked upon a 14-month study to gather business data from coffee farms and the perspectives of coffee managers and laborers.
Here we encountered our first obstacle. In preparing for the study, Carlos asked an obvious question: “How does the Specialty Coffee Association define a specialty coffee farm?”
Carlos didn’t realize he was touching a nerve. Not since the inception of the SCA had we “officially” defined specialty coffee, never mind specialty coffee farms. Though over the years our leaders had written several pieces on the “true meaning” of specialty, none of these were useful in answering a research question. This would from time to time annoy our community, who sought a clearer definition of “specialty coffee” than we were providing.
But now we had no choice. To proceed with the labor research, we had to provide a coherent way to identify specialty coffee at the farm level. This led to a period of study, introspection, and analysis. We knew specialty coffee was different, but how was it different? And we knew that specialty coffee was unique because people liked it better; but how would we recognize that in a systematic way? One common unofficial definition of a specialty coffee at the time was “a coffee that scores at least 80 points using the SCA cupping protocol,” but this definition had several problems. For one, scoring depended on the cupper, and second, only a small percentage of all coffee—and essentially no “commodity” coffee—was ever scored using the 2004 SCA system.
Eventually, we began to find hints of a solution. In reviewing the academic literature about specialty foods, we learned that one could recognize someone’s appreciation of a food by their willingness to pay extra for it. And this is true for specialty coffee—for example, if I’m offered two different 250 g bags of coffee, one costing 8 dollars and another costing 20, why would I buy the 20-dollar version? It would have to be because that coffee is special to me. Extending that framework to the coffee farm, it’s clear that a farm that sells coffee at a significant premium over the “commodity market” would be a reliable indicator that the farm was participating in the “specialty market.”
In his report Specialty Coffee Structure: The Case of Honduras and El Salvador,[1] Dr. Carpio wrote: “Specialty coffee can be defined as ‘any coffee that earns a significant premium’ in the market.” Though this definition was sufficient for Carpio’s research, we realized we needed more detail; especially in relation to what caused the premiums.
Back to the literature we went. We discovered a great paper, “What Explains Specialty Coffee Quality Scores and Prices,” by economists Togo Traore and Norbert Wilson.[2] Their research showed that specialty coffee prices are explained by attributes, those properties that are part of a coffee’s experience and story. Flavor, place of origin, variety, processing style—all these attributes drive a coffee’s sense of specialness. The picture was becoming clearer: specialty coffee had enhanced value that derived from its unique attributes.
We called this “the attributes-based definition of specialty coffee,” and began the work of debating, testing, and wordsmithing our concept. We wrote a white paper entitled “Towards a Definition of Specialty Coffee: Building an Understanding Based on Attributes,”[3] which proposed an improved definition: “Specialty coffee is a coffee or coffee experience with distinctive attributes, which results in significant extra value within the marketplace.” This definition works for a trade organization like us, and is also well suited for researching specialty coffee. Its economic nature makes it measurable, and its clarity makes it easy to understand and use. We’re now using this definition to inform consumer research (how do consumers value specialty coffee’s attributes?), sensory research (how do we identify and categorize coffee’s flavors?), market research (what attributes drive value in diverse markets?), and more.
But there was one more surprise in store for us. One of the researchers on Carlos’s team, Dr. Sarahi Morales, led an important phase of the project: listening to farm workers’ own opinions of their work on specialty and non-specialty farms.[4] First, the researchers reported many of the same characteristics that we expected: that specialty farms grew unique varieties, had different management techniques, and occupied distinct microclimates compared with non-specialty farms.3 But farm workers said they also derive value from the very production of specialty coffee, and not necessarily in the way we expected. Though workers did not report being paid more per day on farms that produced specialty coffee, they did report liking it more.
Once again, the story is told in the attributes. Specialty farms, farm workers said, offered more stable, year-round work, offering a sense of security and consistency. Seasonal work is harder and less predictable than the year-round approach specialty coffee production requires. Farm workers also reported a sense of pride in working for a farm that’s producing specialty coffees. One said, “It feels better to work here, at a specialty coffee farm.” A coworker added: “We feel very proud because we always have a good harvest, and we care for the environment.”
Pride, stability, a good feeling. These farm workers recognize their own valuable attributes in coffee, and this value is special indeed. Our definition had worked in a way that we hadn’t anticipated, allowing us to understand farm workers better. We couldn’t have known that our desire to build knowledge about farm labor would lead to a whole new way of thinking about specialty coffee, but it did. Our knowledge-seeking journey gave us a better way to think about farm workers, but it also led to a framework for defining specialty coffee itself. It’s the joy of knowledge building—you sometimes wind up learning so much more than you could have imagined, and reaping benefits you never anticipated.
PETER GIULIANO is the Senior Advisor of Science Communication and Engagement Strategy at the SCA.
References
[1] Carlos E. Carpio, Luis A. Sandoval, and Mario Muñoz, “Cost and Profitability Analysis of Producing Specialty Coffee in El Salvador and Honduras,” HortTechnology 33, no. 1 (2023): 8–15, https://doi.org/10.21273/HORTTECH05028-22.
[2] Togo M. Traore and Norbert L.W. Wilson, “What Explains Specialty Coffee Quality Scores and Prices: A Case Study from the Cup of Excellence Program,” Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics 50, no.3 (2018), DOI: 10.1017/aae.2018.5.
[3] Specialty Coffee Association, “Towards a Definition of Specialty Coffee: Building an Understanding Based on Attributes” (2021), https://sca.coffee/attributes-whitepaper.
[4] Sarahi Morales and Carlos Carpio, “Farmworkers’ Voices: What It Means to Work in a Specialty Coffee Farm in Honduras and El Salvador,” Journal of International Agricultural and Extension Education 32, no. 3 (2025): 425–446, https://doi.org/10.4148/2831-5960.1516.
We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of 25, Issue 25. 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.
