This weekend last year was my last full weekend in Colombia on my Fulbright exchange. Andrés and I went to Catación Pública up in Usaquén for a professional cupping session in their labs. Catación Pública is one of a handful of places in Colombia where coffee professionals could go to obtain “Q Grader” certification from the Coffee Quality Institute. Q Grader certification has long been touted as similar to sommelier certification for coffee.
Not long before we went for this cupping session, the Specialty Coffee Association released an updated version of its cupping form, which has long been the standard form used by stakeholders in various roles along the coffee value chain in order to objectively determine the value of coffee on a 100 point scale. The new “Coffee Value Assessment” would incorporate “extrinsic” qualities of the coffee as a means of determining value.
As cup scores are what help determine price differentials along the value chain, their importance in the industry is outsized (I’ve described my issues with the objectification of coffee and its arbitrary threshholds here, vis a vis the definition of “specialty coffee”). Prior to my time in Colombia, I’d participated in cuppings at/with roasters back in the US, so I was familiar with the procedure of blind evaluation. What I was not prepared for was how often in our interviews that the cupping form was cited as the singular tool that (directly and indirectly) determines farmer cash flow. As we deepen the data analyses of our interviews, I anticipate we will write more on the implications this from a scholarly marketing perspective.
What was interesting on our visit to Catación Pública was that, they had given us the traditional SCA cupping forms as they showed how they might evaluate a coffee. I asked the trainer if he knew SCA was implementing the new CVA. He did not, so I sent him a link to the SCA’s web page on the CVA, which the trainer shared with some other people in the company. Given the fact that the lab was used for Q Grader certification, I was a bit perplexed that they hadn’t heard of the change coming down the pike yet– especially given the SCA’s publicity announcements about the new CVA were timed prior to SCA Expo in Chicago– but SCA hadn’t made a formal “transition” to the form until the following November.
Fast forward a year to this weekend, when, on the eve of the SCA Coffee Expo in Houston, SCA announced that it would be fully subsuming the CQI’s Q Grader Program and implementing the CVA as part of the program. After October 1, the SCA will officially own and operate all Q Grader programs. Since I’m not a Q Grader myself– or even a lapsed Q Grader– I’m not getting into the ins and outs here of the program, its requirements, or the CVA. But from a marketing perspective as a researcher of equity in coffee value systems, the consolidation does give me pause for a few brief thoughts, and I do so with some of the context I took away from my time in Colombia.
The CVA is a largely a tool designed for the retail side of the industry, more than it is for the production side. As I’ve said before here, farmers and producers are typically price takers instead of price makers; while cup scoring is as close to a “standardization” language that the industry has, it is most used for retailers/cafes ➡️ roasters ➡️ importers ➡️ exporters to figure out the price they are willing to offer a farmer for their coffee. That implies any chances to the assessment form or to the certification (now “license”), system has implications up and down the value chain.
A rebuttal might be that ensuring farmers get proper cupping (or value assessing) training would allow them to understand the value of their coffee better in order to set the price and, by doing so, the CVA will enable farmers to get paid more. This might be the case in theory, however in practice, our discussions/interviews found this is generally not the case. The Q Grader program is expensive and the testing requirements are difficult to pass. This increases the barrier to entry, especially for those with less capital (especially the farmers themselves who are, ironically, supposed to benefit most from it). This means that those who have Q Grader status effectively act as value gatekeepers along the value chain.
Subsuming the Q Grader licensure (along with the use of the CVA) would continue to reinforce existing gatekeeper statuses. As of now, five places in Colombia offer 12 Q Grader trainings over the next ~six months; seven of the trainings are across two locations. Consolidation of Q Grader certification into SCA means that trainers and assistants and other coffee educators end up losing out with their current credentials (and we might even ask the fundamental question of who the credentials are meant for… producers? Or buyers?).
Folding the Q Grader licensure into SCA would likely exacerbate inequities because, paradoxically, the number of gatekeeper Q Graders will inevitably shrink to consolidation, especially at origin countries. And this would be happening, despite the fact that the CVA is effectively consumption-centric. Further, as one industry professional was telling me, “for regions that don’t have a “good” reputation, the CVA it actually penalizes them, because they won’t have the certifications or name recognition for the information attributes.” Without investing and expanding the program in origin countries, there’s even less chance for the CVA to benefit producers directly.
There might be some possibility this happens. Late yesterday I saw the SCA agreed to work with the FNC on implementing the new Q Grader/CVA system in Colombia. But the FNC is a bit of an organizational outlier in the global coffee sector and I was surprised from our interviews how much it distorted the market in Colombia; the folks we spoke with felt the FNC offered little direct value to specialty coffee producers. Maybe this agreement will change some of that? Or, maybe it helps the FNC consolidate its power as market maker?
Additionally, wealthier producers who have more available access to the gatekeeping system (i.e., becoming Q Graders) would have an easier time enacting their own agency, which also exacerbates within-sector inequity at production. In our discussions with various stakeholders in Colombia, we tended to find that wealthier producers had more access to do their own cuppings and analyze their own samples. These farmers/producers tended to have the most agency in price making over price taking, as buyers could take the credibility of their Q Grader status as a factor in their own cupping. Less wealthy farmers had to send their samples away for cupping analyses by gatekeepers such as university labs, private cuppers, or the Federación’s mobile cupping labs, which helped with scoring, but significantly reduced farmer agency. And subsistence farmers almost never had their coffee cupped until they tried to sell to an exporter. Again, the shift of agency along the value chain offloads to value gatekeeping.
While I understand that the CVA was designed to integrate some qualitative qualities of coffee into the pricing of differentials, it remains a significant challenge as the value of coffee is transformed along the value chain. If a Q Grader buyer for roaster cups an 88 point at origin and the farmer has an interesting story to share, the farmer may assume to take the buyer’s price committment, despite the fact the roaster may know they can transform it into (and sell at retail as) a 91 point coffee. To what extent is value transformation exploitatable based on who has access to value knowledge?
Add in the “synergies” and “optimizations” typical of consolidation in industry that reduce organizational costs and overhead at the top, but not necessarily offer more value (and sometimes, underinvestment) to the bottom, and the consolidation of the Q Grader program into the SCA doesn’t necessarily equate to “better” for farmers.
Almost a year ago, the SCA released its findings of its Equitable Value Distribution Survey. I’ll be interested to see how taking over the Q Grader licensure and changing to the CVA will adjust equitable value distribution for producers… but I’m highly skeptical.
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