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A coffee’s variety is important. It can impact how well the plant grows in certain conditions, how resistant it is to diseases, and how it roasts and tastes. Often—as in the case of Gesha—it influences the price a coffee sells for.
But how do we know the variety on the bag matches the tree itself? New research from Ecuador found that some plants grown from seeds marketed as Gesha or Sidra didn’t match their labels.
Coffee plants take years to mature enough to produce cherries. This means that, without proper certification, a farmer may not know which variety was actually planted until they’ve invested considerable time and money. The trees in this study had been growing on a farm in Ecuador for around three years before visual clues such as branch or leaf shape prompted researchers to run a genetic analysis.
The researchers collected samples from four morphotypes, or groups of plants with shared physical traits, each chosen to represent a variety. Using genetic fingerprinting, they found that two of the four morphotypes did not match their declared variety. One plant sold as Sidra, a cross between Bourbon and Typica, was actually genetically closer to Batian, a Kenyan variety. The Gesha plants, bought from someone who had imported them from Panama, were similar but not identical to the famous variety that has long dominated coffee competitions.
The researchers caution that their small sample size means they can’t draw conclusions about seed misidentification more broadly in Ecuador or beyond. Still, they say their findings show the importance of accessible verification procedures for farmers. “Without such measures, the premium value associated with specialty cultivars cannot be reliably linked to their genetic identity,” they wrote.
Read the full story on the misidentified coffee plants here.
