“Highvalue.Coffee Project” and the Growing Importance of Coffee Traceability

Abstract

Nowadays, traceability is the main issue in many businesses, particularly for coffee. The advantages of keeping it at a high degree are that it provides a guarantee for consumers, provides increased power in the value chain, helps quality monitoring, and, last but not least, can be used a marketing tool. In the coffee business, it means verifying the history and the area of origin of green coffee beans (now moving to geolocation) and being able to identify them throughout all the logistic supply chain up to the last customer; to help this, we conceived an innovative service model of traceability and integration through a technique that recognizes the connection between genetic characteristics of coffee varieties and chemical and sensory analysis results, shared on a dedicated platform and linked to a QR code. By linking shipping documents with the results of chemical, genetic, and sensory analysis, users can verify the compliance of all declared data with the quality of the product received. Genetic analysis is based on DNA fingerprinting, detecting the presence of short and repetitive sequences (microsatellites) and characteristics of beans’ genetic code; thanks to a rich Coffea Arabica library that was built, DNA analysis identifies different varieties of green coffee beans which are also linked to the production countries. Chemical–physical analyses consist precisely of the determination of moisture, caffeine, 5-hydroxytrypdamides, and OTA, and sensory analyses are performed through the SCA cupping protocol. Gathered using a blockchain system, all the documents are available in sample cards to guarantee the transparency to both buyer and seller, from bean to cup.

Keywords

• traceability
• sustainability
• DNA fingerprinting
• blockchain system
• chemical–physical analysis
• sensory analysis