SCA to Appoint Task Force to Support Coffee Cuppers and Graders

BY YANNIS APOSTOLOPOULOS, CEO of the Specialty Coffee Association

The SCA’s Cupping and Grading Protocol has become the universal language of trade within the specialty coffee community, which is critically important to coffee producers, traders, and roasters, as well as the skilled professionals who work within the value chain. Today, we are announcing that we will appoint a task force to help build a stronger, more accessible, and more transparent system for coffee cuppers and graders.

The SCA recognizes that coffee cuppers and graders perform vitally important work in discovering, improving, and ensuring the quality of specialty coffee. For the past 3 years, the SCA has been engaged in a project to gather community input and integrate scientific research into an improved SCA Cupping and Grading protocol, which we hope to launch in 2023. This new cupping system will align with a modern, global understanding of specialty coffee to provide a more transparent tool to assess green coffee and discover its value.

As coffee cupping and grading is so vital to the discovery of coffee value, and because we recognize the importance of the cupping protocol’s integrity, we are committed to working with a variety of stakeholder groups, institutions, and producing countries to improve the accessibility of SCA cupping and grading education and certification. SCA’s cupping and grading protocols exist as tools to be used by the community to improve coffee quality, support producers, and establish a common language between buyers and sellers.

Over the past few months, we’ve heard from the Q Grader community—a key group of experts who use the SCA cupping and grading protocols—that they feel underserved and underrepresented in the current administration of the Q program. Though the SCA does not administer the Q program, we take this matter seriously and are taking necessary steps to ensure SCA’s cupping and grading protocols are serving the value chain as intended, and to support coffee cuppers and producers.  

To achieve this result, SCA will appoint a task force comprised of producers, institutional partners, and leaders in the coffee community to help us build a robust system for coffee cuppers and graders. More information on the formation of this task force will be announced soon on our website and via the SCA’s newsletter.

YANNIS APOSTOLOPOULOS is the Chief Executive Officer at the Specialty Coffee Association