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World leader in the production and export of soluble coffee, Brazil also wants to play a leading role in evaluating the quality of this beverage.

To this end, Abics (Brazilian Association of the Soluble Coffee Industry) and Ital (Instituto Tecnológico de Alimentos) developed a methodology that proposes a sensory lexicon and several quality categories for soluble coffee.

Considered the “ugly duckling” of the sector until recently, domestic consumption of soluble coffee has grown by 3.5% per year since 2016, a rate higher than the world’s evolution.

With a 5% share of coffee consumption in Brazil, the soluble coffee industry already uses 1 million bags of green coffee to produce its products.

With so much progress, Brazil also needed a global role in the classification of this coffee, says Aguinaldo Lima, Director of Institutional Relations at Abics.

The developed methodology evaluates the quality by the intensity of the attributes and not by scores given by tasters. This new methodology will allow consumers to select soluble coffee according to their preference and method of consumption.

Consumers will be able to select products ideal for pure coffee, mixed with milk, cappuccinos, drinks or gastronomy from the shelves of retail outlets.

Coffee is a complex product, and this complexity is due to the combination of many factors along the chain of agricultural production, processing, roasting and grinding, as well as elaboration and consumption, according to Lima.

Any coffee can be processed as soluble coffee. The first step is a definition of the extraction percentage. That is, the percentage of the roasted grain that passes to the extract. The same coffee can result in quite different products, depending on the percentage adopted.

The soluble coffee range, therefore, needs a system to assess quality and communicate it to consumers in a transparent way, says Lima.

Coffee quality has been assessed by tasters, specialists who are dedicated to classifying coffee according to their appreciation of its quality.

Although the system has evolved, it remains an affective judgment, and tasters’ opinions may differ depending on their training, culture, and psychology. Some attributes can be highly favorable for some, but negative for others.

Abics sees the need, therefore, for a consensus on what is desirable and undesirable in coffee. This makes the quality rating objective and no longer affective.

The evaluation becomes the result of the presence and intensity of several desirable and undesirable attributes. Tasters would be descriptive of the intensity of various coffee attributes.

The adoption of such a system allows a consensus in the soluble coffee industries on which attributes are most desirable; gives modern tools of sensory science; and equips the industry with a language to speak to consumers about taste and quality in a more understandable way.

The first step towards creating a descriptive system for soluble coffee is to identify the main flavor attributes of soluble coffee, which the industry has been doing for two years.

Furthermore, to identify the interrelationships of the main flavor and quality attributes and, finally, to propose a test and evaluation method for soluble coffees, based on the intensity of the main flavor attributes, according to Abics.

To arrive at the flavor attributes, Abics and Ital brought together tasters who participated in seven tests with different samples of soluble coffee.

They created a sensory lexicon with 15 attributes, on a scale of up to five intensities for each one, ranging from absence to a very high presence of these attributes in coffee.

After assembling the lexicon of descriptive attributes, the relationship between these key attributes and quality was made. The industries decided on three levels of quality: excellent, differentiated and conventional soluble coffee.

As a result, the system for assessing the quality of soluble coffee is now based on a weighted score and is no longer just affective.

Based on the intensity of the main determining attributes, the quality index becomes objective, replicable and based on the same reference.

For Lima, “the objective is to create a protocol language standardization. Fifteen attributes were detected in coffee and a scale of intensity from zero to five of the presence of these attributes is determined.”

“The new methodology classifies the coffees within this scale of 15 attributes and intensity. This was done based on a mathematical construction of an algorithm, establishing weights for the attributes”, says the director of the entity.

With this, it was also possible to create an application (software) to determine the result of this evaluation. He classifies the soluble coffee category as excellent, differentiated or conventional.

Abics believes that this new methodology can also be adopted by industries in other countries.