Coffee is a brewed drink prepared from roasted coffee beans, which are the seeds of berries from the Coffea plant. The two most commonly grown are the highly regarded arabica, and the less sophisticated but stronger and more hardy robusta. Once ripe, coffee berries are picked, processed, and dried.

Coffee is one of the world’s most important crops, given the number of people making a livelihood directly or indirectly from it. It is estimated that there are more than 6000 million kilos of coffee per year and 120 million people depend on it. One should keep in mind that this crop is the main source of income for many developing countries.

As the world’s largest producer of coffee, Brazil produces 25% of the world’s coffee supply. 80% of the coffee that comes from Brazil is Arabica.

For more information on the characteristics of different types of coffees, please visit: http://www.botanical-online.com/coffee.htm#

Extensive adulterations of coffee have been practiced, but since stringent laws, national and state, have been enacted, this evil is rapidly decreasing.

One of the crude forms of adulteration which were found on the market many years ago was the fabrication of artificial beans, molded in the shape of coffee beans and colored to represent either the green bean or the roasted bean as the case might be.

There was no difficulty in detecting these artificial beans when the mass was looked at carefully, as there were always differences which would be discriminatory.However, a person not expecting anything of the kind, might easily buy without suspicion or without detection, coffee beans containing as high as 25 percent of these artificial bodies.

One of the other forms of adulteration is the use of chicory. Of all the roasted vegetable substances which have been used in coffee, or as substitutes for coffee, there is none that has garnered as much  vogue as chicory.

The roots, when roasted, are used extensively for mixture with coffee. Chicory is commonly employed in the household and in the cafes or restaurants to give these characteristics to the coffee.Its addition to coffee, on the contrary, for sale to the unwary or innocent purchaser is purely a commercial fraud.

To know more about detecting adulterants in not just coffee but in any kind of food or beverage, please visit our solutions related to food and beverage industry: https://www.estcal.com/resource/whitepaper-expanded-analysis-fruit-fleuressence or https://www.estcal.com/resource/technical-paper-quantification-diacetyl-and-limonene-levels-orange-juice

A new electronic nose, which is based on rapid gas chromatography called zNose®, provides a quality control methodology for quickly measuring volatile organics in coffee aroma.

There has recently been an increased interest in the analysis of coffee aroma as a way of controlling quality and increasing customer acceptance.

Since the instrument is portable and fast, it can be used  with sensory panel measurements as well.

Comparing sensory panel findings with real-time VOC measurements may help link specific compounds with coffee aroma.  Real-time analytical measurements of coffee aroma may also be used for monitoring production processes.

Hence, we have focused on a new electronic nose technology based on ultra-fast gas chromatography to detect and quantify compounds associated with coffee aroma in near real time.