What do we mean by traceability? Ask an accountant, a regulator, a roaster or a consumer and you likely receive four different answers. All are right, yet the coffee industry often speaks about traceability as though everyone means the same thing. Being clear on the differences will become increasingly important as the EU’s Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT) comes in to play and drives up the focus on clarity of claim. But knowing also helps us understand what questions we need to ask and what pitfalls might be peculiar to our take.
In this small miniseries we will ask how did we end up here, and what lies behind some of that messaging in each instance? First up, quality.
Traceability as a Quality Signal
The prominence of traceability as a synonym for quality came about almost at the very inception of speciality coffee. Erna Knutsen coined of the term ‘specialty coffee’ and was a key instigator of the movement. She established a reputation for caring tremendously about coffee, advocating for values of quality, identity and distinction. By giving voice to coffee origins and connected producers you can see how the word traceability begins to relate to understanding the impact of a terroir, country or varietal.
During the explosion of the third wave in coffee, it became shorthand to suggest that one of the reasons speciality coffee was special was precisely because we knew these details. That developed to include flavour profiles as those producers were encouraged to experiment or roasters found new iterations of varietals and we felt we could trace flavours back to an (approximated) cause and effect. That was true. In comparison, mindless supermarket brand coffees were impossible to trace and therefore exhibited none of these traits and were no good.
Now this, like any good story, has elements of truth and elements of convenience within its slightly pointed attack. It is not true that coffee was fully untraceable previously. It is true that almost all were not asking the question, or the right person, and that gross oversimplifications anonymised most coffee that we consumed.
For example, naming a coffee as Brazil when you look at it says everything and nothing much. Brazil as a country is larger than the Europe Union, which leaves a tremendous amount of room to move for something supposedly specific. Even reducing that to ‘Santos’ as the exporting port doesn’t refine that much. Yet certain types become favoured by buyers and markets establish their own requirements, so these words do become attached to a meaning of sorts. The theoretical ‘comes from anywhere’ collapses into a more regular source through convenience and ease. The structure of a system is often the accumulated record of the easiest decisions available at each moment. Processors and exporters will have their own network of mills, and farmers in the locale close to them. They will have their own methodologies and practises, as well as preferences for the right level of grading that works for them and their customers. Repeat business and continued acceptance reinforces these criteria until it becomes understood, set, acknowledged, and deferred to.
There are a few other elements at play here, but focussing on the quality aspect, we can see how, just by market knowledge, the meaning has already started to bleed. For Santos, exported for instance to Great Britain, by naming and association has already co-opted its geographical indication for a quality, or grade.
The foil to the Santos example is perhaps Excelso. This sits on many roasters books as just that, but with the exception that the grade is what you are buying, not the source. Explicitly and implicitly then, that means that Excelso untraceable. Or does it? Excelso is a unique, Colombian-only grade. It sits nicely with Santos as its opposite, because it is a grade that has inherited a geographical indication. Again, this is a coffee produced for a requirement, and that market just didn’t require further information, not that it was not available. But if it is not known in a roastery, and as a common element in a blend in a supermarket, by extension it is not known to a consumer.
Supermarkets and Mass Market Coffee
A very short foray into the history of industrialisation of coffee and the supermarket then, for it is this we must look at to understand the ‘villain’ in the piece. Historically, people bought green coffee for roasting at home both in the US, the UK, and the EU. We’ve seen the old roasters on eBay and the like. But people bought green coffee because it kept. Roasted coffee did not. It came from different countries and that impacted journey times, conditions of buying or even acidity levels. Traceability then was not a virtue, as it was the ordinary condition of buying green and just like today was a mixture of origin and /or grades. What industrial roasting and packaging removed was not the information but the need for the household to hold it.
I mention the US for a reason. Coffee industrialised earlier and harder there. Arbuckles’ Ariosa, a pre-roasted coffee sold in sealed paper packages with an egg-and-sugar glaze to slow staling (hello torrefacto!), launched in 1873 and is usually credited as the product that took roasting out of the American home. Britain had a coffee-roasting trade too, but Britain was a tea nation so the shift there mattered to far fewer households and the mass coffee that eventually arrived was largely instant.
When speciality arrived in the UK in 1998, taking the formation of the SCAE as the marker (with our own Simon Wakefield as the first National Coordinator and DRW one of the original founders), it came with a new energy. It also arrived into a particular British moment. The 1980s and 90s had seen a period of supermarket discounting and a steady cheapening of what was on the shelf. In economic terms, supermarkets stopped competing solely through stocking brands and started competing through managing supply chains. Their collective growth in power also created an incentive – if consumers appeared willing to buy a slightly cheaper product, then suppliers would reformulate until they reached the lowest acceptable quality. This made many products affordable to households that previously could not buy them regularly.
Ultimately, cheap became easy to read as poor quality and the public learned to see coffee that way. The imported American ‘specialty’ narrative that arrived at the turn of the century was anti-industrial, suspicious of anonymity and found a homegrown example already waiting for it. Pushing for an engagement with the tea drinking public via its third -space coffee-shop community, the story described a villain, and the British shelf supplied one.
The two met and set. If the cheap coffee could be the anonymous one, then a name became the mark of the coffee that was more. Traceability shifted from the ordinary condition of the trade to the signal of quality, and it landed at the same time as the energy of the third wave was building here. That signal was reinforced by the growth of speciality coffee shops and roasters. It was a new sector hungry for knowledge and seized upon every nugget of information found. Following the cue precipitated by Knutsen, country quickly became region, region, farm, and farm, plot.
A small note, on the term ‘third wave’. What was talked about as third wave then, has half become second wave now. American history is not UK history or European history. The journeys coffee took through each are different, yet as a collective industry we have reimagined our histories to become one, much like the Santos example above.
Culinary Theatre and Escapism
This becomes visible in the movement of the country as a whole. There is a neat parallel with the rise of idealised food representation or voyeurism and the infamous supermarket ads that stated something was ‘not just …’. I’m sure the voice is in your head as you read that. Details were popping up everywhere, and not just in coffee. They had become desirable, a key part of the messaging that was required to sell premium. But adjectives sold food, speciality made adjectives sell coffee, and the escalation into honey, anaerobic, co-ferment is the same move with more syllables.
Under that kind of pressure, both competitive and aspirational, you can see why the speciality industry doubled down, why processing moved from wet or dry to natural, honey, washed, through yellow, white, red, or black, and later to anaerobic, carbonic maceration, co-ferment, et al. Excitement and innovation was part of it, but so was the messaging. Definitions deepened, past the ‘what’ into the ‘why and to what effect?’ until the reasoning behind the coffee became part of the coffee itself.
People arrived too. The growth of social media, the launch of the iPhone in 2007 followed by the birth of Instagram in 2010 gave us the ability to quickly share pictures from our visits to the farm. These landed after the establishment of the language, but before it had got old, and so it never really dominated in the way the technicals did. Trips to origin are not cheap, and were more for the green buyers than baristas, and there are less of them.
They were not comparable to the other food pictures we were seeing in that era either. The growing market in origins meant one innovative producer could create multiple lots, so the attention would remain on the details as a differentiator too, be that varietal, altitude, or process.
Fashioning the Craft
With supermarkets championing the linguistics, and owning the visuals, the ‘enemy’ had had to shift somewhat, so moved away somewhat from supermarkets to the fast-becoming ubiquitous coffee chains which by now were popping up everywhere. Perhaps you could argue it has moved towards the equipment, too, with the switch from traditional machines to the semi- and fully-automatics in the chains, resulting in the adoption of the second-hand manual machines becoming part of the default visual language across many a new quality focussed start up café.
Much like the mentioned wave when it crashes to the shore, a complicated history is expensive to remember. The full arrival of the movement created cafes, competitions, coffees and consumers of all manner of variations, but a three-stage story is cheap. “First wave, second wave, third wave” is an extraordinarily efficient mental model. Once it became established, people naturally started fitting history into it, and if a few edges got tidied in the process, well, so be it.
So where do we end up? Coffee had switched from traceability as an implied grade from a larger geographical area to a precise cause-and-effect waterfall of decisions. Now you could argue a coffee is not speciality without a three-generation family history, a subplot on the farm and a fermentation recipe to match.
The justification for better coffee was needed. Traceability was the solution to all that ailed us.
