Welcome to the SCA’s Green Coffee Summit, a home for coffee market resources.
Spotlight: Consuming Markets
Green Coffee Summit wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of our Lead Sponsor, Sustainable Harvest.
Featured Video
Coffee's Essential Worker Community: An Action Oriented Path to Building Back Better with Living Wage and Living Income
Living wage and income have long been gaining steam among the media, global governments, sustainability standards, businesses, and a wealth of other actors, including consumers. But the necessity of ensuring a basic but decent living is more stark than ever in an age where vulnerability abounds.
NEW Market Research
Five Key Takeaways from the National Coffee Data Trends Study: Specialty Coffee Breakout Report
The National Coffee Data Trends Study is packed with information: conducted twice a year, the report tracks coffee consumer trends, attitudes, and behavior. What are five key things that the specialty coffee industry should pay attention to specifically? Learn more from the SCA’s Research Manager, Katie von der Lieth →
Explore the Latest Resources
Evolving the SCA Cupping Protocol and Form: An Overview of the Pilot Testing Process
MARIO R. FERNÁNDEZ-ALDUENDA, PhD explains the learnings of the evaluation phase of the SCA’s Coffee Value Assessment System work as well as an update on the pilot process at the heart of the project’s ongoing evolution phase.
Teawords: Rendering Quality in the India Tea Industry
Anthropologist SARAH BESKY, PhD considers the relationship between tea’s sensory lexicon and ideas of quality across tea’s colonial history and current-day trading practices, highlighting that quality is far from an objective measure—and that it must be constantly reproduced in practice, including how we choose and use words to adjudicate quality over time.
From Value to Values: Determining the Worth of Coffee
Anthropology Professor EDWARD F. FISCHER, author of Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third- Wave Tastemakers Create Value, explains the different types of value, ways of determining worth, and how we create economic value by drawing on other sorts of values (moral, social, political, and other cultural values) through the lens of his fieldwork in Guatemala.
Understanding Value in Coffee
In this four-part series, we will hear from the authors of two recent publications by the Specialty Coffee Association, the Coffee Sensory and Cupping Handbook and the Attributes White Paper. Drawing upon advances in sensory science, the global expansion of specialty coffee, and a commitment to making specialty coffee a thriving, equitable, sustainable activity for the entire value chain, SCA speakers Kim Elena Ionescu, Dr. Mario Fernández Alduenda, Peter Giuliano, and Jenn Rugolo will make the case that the coffee industry's understanding of value has evolved over the past two decades and our tools - like the SCA Cupping Form - must evolve, as well.
How Do Cuppers Cup? | 25, Issue 18
Dr. JORGE BERNY and Dr. MARIO FERNÁNDEZ-ALDUENDA share initial results of a collaborative study examining how cuppers cup and exploring the potential impacts of a proposed component of the reengineered cupping protocol.
Comprendiendo y evolucionando el Sistema de evaluación de valor del café de la SCA
Desde su creación en el 2004, el actual sistema de cata de la SCA se ha transformado en una norma del secto cafetero, con reconocimiento global por parte de muchos actores interesados en todo el mundo, para evaluar la calidad del café y ayudar a determinar su valor en contratos comerciales. Mientras tanto, nuestra comprensión de la ciencia sensorial y de las propiedades sensoriales del café, así como del sector del café de especialidad y su contexto global, han avanzado significativamente
Evaluating and Evolving the SCA Coffee Value Assessment System
Since it was created in 2004, the existing SCA cupping system has become a globally recognized industry standard used by many stakeholders across the globe to assess coffee quality and to assist in the determination of a coffee’s value in contracts. Meanwhile, our understanding of sensory science and coffee’s sensorial properties, as well as the specialty coffee industry and its global context, have advanced significantly
The Power of the Extrinsic
"It's what's in the cup that matters," right? But is that actually true? The SCA's Chief Research Officer, Peter Giuliano, examines trends in consumer preference research that suggests a coffee's extrinsic attributes play a significant role in coffee choice and enjoyment by specialty coffee consumers.
Valuing Coffee: Evolving the SCA’s Cupping Protocol into a Coffee Value Assessment System | 25
Today’s SCA Cupping Protocol and the SCA Cupping Form are among the most used tools of the coffee industry, applied daily by thousands of people around the world, serving actors across coffee’s vast and complex value-generating system.
All in the Mind | 25
Corresponding author MATEUS MANFRIN ARTÊNCIO shares the findings of a recent paper, “A Cup of Black Coffee with GI, please! Evidence of Geographical Indication Influence on a Coffee Tasting Experiment,” published in Physiology & Behavior, confirming the significant influence an extrinsic attribute like a geographical indication has on consumers’ tasting.
Exploring the Intrinsic
Using the attributes-based definition of specialty coffee, we’ll explore how our understanding of “specialty” has widened—and will continue to widen—in the coming years as we integrate new species and new processing methods into our specialty lexicon.
Opportunities for Added Value Under the Attributes-Based Definition of Specialty
Do we really understand the impact of the attributes-based definition of specialty coffee on what is now "specialty"? Jenn Rugolo, the SCA's Curatorial Director, examines the impact categorization has on our perception of the world and explains why the new definition of specialty coffee released by the SCA in 2021 gives us more opportunities to deliver on specialty's promise.
Not Just Fresh: Expanding Our Concept of Functional Packaging
Coffee's interest in understanding multimodal perception on coffee experiences has most recently focused on cup shape, size, and weight or environmental ambiance like color, music, and texture. As home coffee consumption continues to increase even as pandemic restrictions ease, so too has our interest in understanding packaging (an element of the coffee experience making its way consistently into the home) through a multimodal lens. Dr. Fabiana Carvalho introduces an ongoing study, conducted in collaboration with the Coffee Science Foundation, exploring the effect of packaging on the perception of specialty coffee and explains why we need to expand our concept of "functional" packaging beyond simply keeping coffee fresh.
Aprender
Un caso de negocio para incrementar el consumo de café especial en países productores
Las oportunidades adicionales para crear y capturar más valor son clave para que los productores reduzcan el riesgo. Por lo tanto, es vital comprometerse con estrategias que les permitan a los productores crear (más) valor y obtener un mayor y mejor parte del precio al consumidor →