✉️ This story was featured in this week’s Coffee News Club
👋 Get the Coffee News Club newsletter in your inbox weekly—sign up.
Last week, the Specialty Coffee Association hosted its annual trade show in Houston, Texas, one of the biggest global coffee events, drawing thousands of attendees.
On April 24, the day before the show opened, the SCA dropped industry-changing news: they would be taking over the professional sensory evaluation certification known as the Q Grader program. The SCA announced that it planned to “evolve” the Q program and merge it with the organization’s updated cupping standards, the Coffee Value Assessment (CVA).
The CVA aims to redefine how coffee quality is assessed, and its design is “rooted in the latest sensory science and built on years of research and collaboration.”
One of the SCA’s goals is to encourage wider adoption of the CVA within the coffee industry. As part of this effort, the SCA signed a memorandum of understanding with the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC) on April 25 to use the CVA, as reported by Nick Brown for Daily Coffee News.
Under the agreement, the FNC will train its cuppers and technical teams to use the new cupping standards and “explore its broader adoption across Colombian coffees,” according to a press release. The FNC is one of the most influential coffee governing bodies—Brown called the FNC “arguably the world’s most impactful national producer group in terms of market reach and governance.”
The SCA will also share data gathered from the CVA “on coffee attributes and market preferences” with the FNC to support the organization’s research efforts. The SCA said the data would help Colombian producers understand “evolving market trends and preferences—ensuring that insights gathered through the CVA directly benefit coffee-growing communities.”
Colombia is the third-largest coffee producer globally, and the FNC has been active for decades in marketing Colombian coffee to a global audience, most notably with Juan Valdez, a fictional farmer used in commercials and other marketing materials. The FNC represents over half a million farmers—the partnership between the SCA and the FNC may help with the SCA’s push for wider industry adoption of the CVA.
