Mm, that morning cup o’ Joe gets your day off to a great start. But could that 100% organic Colombian be fake? Unfortunately, coffee is becoming an increasingly common target for food counterfeiters.
What’s really interesting about coffee scams, is that it combines so many different food counterfeiting methods. Coffee has a mislabeling problem, like salmon and other fish. It also suffers from the diluting of better varieties with cheaper, more plentiful ones, as in the case olive oil. There’s also one other commonality with other recent food fraud cases.
As Gizmodo reports,like so many other counterfeit foods, part of the root cause of the problem is climate change. Coffee, particularly in Brazil, has been hit hard by the sweeping droughts we’ve experienced recently. The question wasn’t if, but when it would happen. With tightening stores from a looming shortage, rising prices, and more and more emphasis on specialty coffees, it’s no wonder that counterfeit coffee is becoming a problem big enough to need faster, easier testing.
Some coffee producers knowingly mislabel their beans, passing off cheaper Robusta beans as pricier, more desirable Arabica — but as the Washington Post reports, scientists have come up with a new way to sniff out coffee bean fraud. A study published in the latest edition of the scientific journal Food Chemistry details a process Italian researchers have developed for identifying “the percentage of each species of bean in blends,” meaning they can identify whether your pricey single-origin coffee is being bulked up with cheap Robusta beans.
The process involves mixing coffee beans with formic acid and then passing the mixture through a high-performance liquid chromatography instrument; the chemists say it’s faster, easier, and cheaper than other methods of identifying coffee bean species. Beyond one kind of bean being subbed for another, a 2014 report from the National Chemical Society found that ground coffee could contain all sorts of filler ingredients, from barley to wheat. (Scientists have developed high-tech methods of testing for that too, and it involves DNA testing.)
While it’s not currently known just how widespread coffee fraud is — or isn’t — it’s a problem that only seems destined to get worse going forward, because the global demand for the precious caffeinated beverage is rising. Each year, billions of dollars of coffee are sold worldwide, making it one of the most traded commodities. The global revenue of the coffee segment in 2023 is expected to be USD 495.5 billion. The revenue has grown steadily over the past years and is expected to grow annually by 4.47%.
So, how can you tell if you’ve just spent $10 on a bag of the real thing? Well, you can determine how genuine your coffee is by performing a simple floating bean test. Authentic coffee beans are highly porous, low in starch, and have several air spaces. Because of this, they tend to float in water due to their lower density, while tampered beans tend to sink. This is true for coffee powder as well.
While this method provides some indication, it’s not foolproof and can vary based on how the beans are grounded, the time of roasting, and more. And of course the drawback of this test can only be performed after purchasing a product – it can’t determine the authenticity before purchase. This is why coffee brands need to implement advanced solutions with which consumers can identify genuineness even before you shell out your hard-earned money.
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