Keeping Coffee Quality Stable in an Unstable Market
The coffee futures market is volatile; your coffee quality should be stable.
The cost of coffee purchases has increased faster than retail prices for consumers. Roasters and retailers are financially challenged to remain profitable. However, there are opportunities for convenience retailers to manage coffee quality and leverage the strength of relationships with their coffee suppliers to maintain coffee flavor.
Green coffee futures prices on the Intercontinental Exchange have reached historically high levels, making coffee much more expensive for everyone throughout the supply chain. Knowing these financial challenges for exporters, importers and roasters will help retailers better manage quality in a challenging cost-of-goods situation.
Maintaining the quality of the coffee products we purchase from roasters is usually limited to how coffee looks, smells and tastes. Typical supply relationships are longstanding, developing trust over time. In a challenging market, in order to ensure consistent quality to consumers, a trust but verifiable approach is warranted to protect your business from unforeseen issues.
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Typical quality control for roasted coffee products includes physical analysis for net weight, grind particle size, oxygen and carbon dioxide in the headspace, moisture content and roast development. Sensory evaluation includes how the beverage looks, smells and tastes, which are the critical characteristics impacting consumer enjoyment.
Coffee is a ritualistic product, with consumers demanding their beverage have consistent flavor day by day. Proactive management of quality includes requesting quality control reports from suppliers to verify the results of their testing. Highly sophisticated retailers often have in-house quality control testing to validate quality, ensuring products meet specifications and expectations. Some utilize outside independent laboratories to perform comprehensive quality control testing on their behalf.
Weighing the Outcome of Change
Changes to physical characteristics will directly impact the way coffee tastes. Understanding the correlation between physical and sensory is important.
Two main options roasters use to reduce their costs or reduce the price to retailers are net weight reduction to save money because coffee is bought and sold by weight, and lightening the roast development to reduce weight loss during roasting. Both options will change the flavor of the beverage. Changes to consumer experiences may damage your business, considering hot beverages are destination products.
Other physical issues are not related to price but will change the quality of the beverage, such as grind size which will affect brewing and impact the strength and intensity of the beverage. Course grind will result in a thin and weak beverage, often astringent due to under-extraction. Extra fine grind will be over-extracted, producing a bitter and heavy drink which may be earthy and sour.
Too much oxygen in the package headspace will increase the rate of staling, producing woody, papery and cereal flavors. Not enough carbon dioxide in the package headspace indicates excessive delays between roasting and packaging, reducing coffee's aroma and sweet flavors.
Before any changes are approved, be sure to test the new specification by brewing and tasting the beverage both internally with your staff and externally with consumers. Regulars who buy coffee every day are the most familiar with flavor and intensity and will alert you quickly if the quality is unacceptable.
The Retailer & the Roaster
Retailers select coffee roasters with the same consideration that roasters utilize to select green coffee for purchase, using price, quality, availability and relationship as the benchmarks.
The skill and sophistication of the roaster includes their ability to manage flavor stability during price volatility. For blends, they will change country of origin components to manage price and availability with the goal of maintaining flavor. Recognizing the roaster's responsibility to change blends is the trust part of the relationship. Verifying that the coffee looks, smells and tastes the same is the buyer's responsibility.
Terroir, also known as the taste of place, explains why produce, wine, beer, coffee, etc., have different flavor characteristics because of where the agriculture crops are grown. Managing blend components by taste is the primary consideration from the consumer's perspective. This necessitates an open and transparent dialogue between roasters and retailers to determine mutually beneficial product decisions.
If your coffee flavor changes, a quality investigation will help reveal the root cause — either an unintended process control issue that was not caught by the roaster's quality control, a processing decision to manage plat output or a product decision intended to manage price.
Supplier relationships are best managed through transparent communications to understand the pressures of physical and financial risk by both parties. Success is achieved when mutually beneficial decisions are reached.
The current coffee price crisis will challenge flavor quality and financial stability. Providing realistic purchase forecasts will help coffee roasters plan purchases and manage inventories to make strategic decisions when green coffee prices, quality and availability are most advantageous. Collaborating to confirm acceptable quality and determine unacceptable flavors will help roasters manage their business and retailers maintain happy customers.
Spencer Turer is vice president at Coffee Enterprises, based in Hinesburg, Vt. He can be reached at Spencer@ce.coffee or 802-864-5760.
Editor's note: The opinions expressed in this column are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Convenience Store News.