Purity test: Keeping the coffee industry honest

Recent declines in coffee production worldwide have tempted some suppliers to add fillers to ground coffee including brown sugar, a variety of grains, and even dirt, but a new purity test may help keep the industry on its toes and consumers in the know.

by John Tyburski

Copyright © Daily Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

First published at Daily Digest News on August 11, 2014

How about a nice hot cup of dirt-infused coffee tomorrow morning? Consumers may be sipping soil with their coffee more than they realize. Drought and plant diseases in coffee-growing regions of the world have negatively affected this year’s coffee production, motivating some less scrupulous suppliers to “cut” their ground coffee with fillers.

Though not harmful, these filler ingredients make a unit volume of ground coffee fill more bags, and they go completely unnoticed by consumers. Wood, twigs, coffee bean husks, a variety of beans and grains, acai seeds, brown sugar, and even chunks of soil have been found in ground coffee destined for the retail shelf. Once roasted and ground, the extra ingredients are virtually indistinguishable from the coffee.

However, help seems to be arriving as researchers present this week on a new test they have developed for catching impurities in ground coffee up to 95 percent of the time. Dr. Suzana Lucy Nixdorf and colleagues at the University of Londrina in Brazil are presenting their preliminary results of the 2014 International Meeting of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest annual scientific meeting, being held this week in San Francisco.

“With our test, it is now possible to know with 95 percent accuracy if coffee is pure or has been tampered with…,” said Nixdorf in a statement. “[A]fter roasting and grinding the raw material, it becomes impossible to see any difference between grains of lower cost incorporated into the coffee, especially because of the dark color and oily texture of coffee.”

A press conference relating to the coffee impurity testing research is scheduled for Tuesday, August 12, at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time and will be available via the ACS Ustream channel.