all the arabicans that we have, all the varieties that we grow are incredibly, incredibly similar genetically. And this is then what is causing them to be so not resilient to diseases, to climate change, to drought and so on. And that's a huge, huge problem that we have in this industry that is coming up. How to, and that's what the scientists want to answer is, can we make arabicans through some hybrids or some, yeah, some finding new varieties, more resilient and keeping the same quality.
And right now, there were some small steps done to this, but a huge change hasn't come out yet. So there's no huge change that would say, okay, now we ground this arabic, we've bred this arabicans that solves our all coffee problems right now. There's a lot of programs in the world that want to do this. And in one of the studies, I remember scientists saying that they estimate that we have 10 years of time left.
So if in 10 years, we don't find this problem, we don't find a solution to this problem, we should slowly start to forget about arabic being in coffee. The coffee industry is headed into a defining year. 2026 will be the year coffee's crisis meets its crossroads. And the businesses that plan ahead will be the ones that have the best chance to make it through stronger.
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Welcome to the Daily Coffee Pro by Mappafour friends. I'm your host Lee Safar and this is episode three of an awesome five-part series with Samo from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences or ZOR. We are talking about what is real innovation in coffee. And in this episode, we're talking about what's happening in mainstream scientific innovation and how that relates to what's going on in coffee.
So, Samo, what is happening in mainstream scientific innovation? Yes, one of the topics I wanted to talk about today is the fact that what we see is we have a crisis in coffee, right? There's a crisis on the supply side. And it's not a simple crisis.
There's many things that are happening on this level of the production on the farming side where, I mean, people know better than me, I'm not the best person to talk about, but just to review this that we know where we are, there's the climate change, there are pests and diseases that are becoming more and more problematic for coffee and there's the social part, right? So, average age of the farmer is becoming older and older and they are getting huge problems into finding people who actually work in the farm. And it's becoming it's a crisis that is developing and right now we're not yet in the full crisis mode, but it's a question of time when there's going to be a full crisis mode. And we see that there is quite a lot of innovation happening or research happening in the science in this field to keep everything going as it is going today.
It's great to hear you acknowledge that the crisis is real because there's a lot of people in the industry who don't want to acknowledge that the crisis is real. They would rather be distracted by or they would rather distract people with coffee competitions and with new tools and new innovation and certificates and all of that kind of stuff. When the reality of it is, while we do that farmers are not getting any signal that it is worth fighting to continue to grow coffee. Yeah, I mean they're kind of just forgotten a bit, right?
So, we want to keep this status quo that is now it's like, okay, we're producing coffee on the cheap, in huge volumes and we have issues and a lot of research that is now happening in science is really focusing on just continuing as we are. The human nature is like this, we like to keep things not changed and we like to keep solutions to make sure that things don't change. And right now we see really a lot of research happening on the plant science side. You say more about that?
Yeah, it's called the ASIC Coffee Scientific Conference. It's an every two year conference that really true coffee scientists visit. There's also visits from the coffee industry, mostly pretty much all commercial side. And of course, what I want to say is the level of science and coffee that you hear at this conference has increased dramatically.
I've been first time about 10 years ago and the level has increased. What has also changed really a lot is that the focus went from the processing side of coffee by the main processing and the science level of this means roasting, grinding, packaging, these processes and industrial processes. Yes, from the studies on this side, the shift has been that the most of the science that is actually done on coffee today, when we talk about pure university switches researching coffee, it seems at least from what this conference presented. And I assume most of side coffee scientists who do coffee as their main topic were there and most of the topics they were presented were on the plants themselves, on the plant science and farming.
So there's a huge number of studies going on on the farming side. When you talk about the sites that's happening at the farming level of coffee, is that focused on yield or is that focused on plant resilience, soil resilience, microbiology, flavour, varieties, resistant strains to disease and to climate change, where's the focus? By far the main focus is on resilience and disease genetics. So the main issue that why this is talked about so much and why it's studied so much is that arabica coffee, which we all so much like, is incredibly incredibly has an incredibly low genetic diversity.
So if you compare it to conifera or robusta or to other coffees, like alginodes, for example, and if you take just some coniferas and some alginodes that you can find around and test their genetic and you look at the variability of the genome and you compare to arabica and I really still can't forget about this one chart that one of the researchers had. They had I think 700 arabicas and then maybe 30 arabustas and 30 arginodes that they tested and all of the arabicas were in one point that was just indistinguishable in the chart. It was not around and all others, for two species were all around the chart. So all the arabicas that we have, all the varieties that we grow are incredibly incredibly similar genetically and this is then what is causing them to be so not resilient to diseases, to climate change, to drought and so on.
And that's that's a huge, huge problem that we have in this industry that is coming up. What the scientists want to answer is, can we make arabica through some hybrids or some, yeah, some finding new varieties, more resilient and keeping the same quality. And right now, there were some small steps done to this, but a huge change hasn't come out yet. So there's no huge change that would say, okay, now we ground this or we bred this arabica that solves our all coffee problems right now.
There's a lot of programs in the world that want to do this. And in one of the studies, I remember scientists saying that they estimate that we have 10 years of time left. So even 10 years, we don't find this problem. We don't find the solution to this problem.
We should solely start to forget about arabica being the main coffee. So many times we talk about that, agronomists have come on the podcast, other scientists have come on the podcast, farmers have come on the podcast and said, we have maximum 20 years left in arabica. And people don't believe me. They don't believe the guests.
I how serious from when you being at that conference, how serious were people about this as an estimation? I'm not sure how serious this scientist was very serious about this. Of course, there were there different opinions about it. I talked to people there, some are fully serious about this.
Some don't agree fully, agree that it's a huge problem, but disagree that it's, you know, so serious, it's hard to say. But the risk is there, right? I mean, we cannot protect the future. We don't know what will happen.
Maybe we have a huge problem in five years. Maybe we're good for another 30 years. Who knows? But the risk is clearly there because it has been identified by so many people.
Well, and because it's getting so hard to run a viable business as a coffee farmer, that kind of stacked onto the issue of arabica being a very challenging variety to grow. Both of those things are going to impact the longevity of arabica as a viable crop for our industry. So it's not just whether it's survivable as a species. It's the idea that if we're going to want to put in the effort to try and figure out how to solve this problem, even if we do say, okay, here you go, this, we know that this one works, we know that this one will survive.
Are we going to be able, are they going to get paid an adequate wage and an adequate, not wage, but an adequate income as a farmer and paid fairly to grow that? Or are we going to go back to monocrobing? And the big corporate farms are going to be growing these varieties? Very hard to say for me.
I think I hope that this will not happen, that this would be only in the monoculture way, but it's way too hard to say about this. I mean, I'll be open. I'm not so deep into this topic myself, into the social and corporate topic of coffee farming. But yeah, I mean, the hope is that whatever development we have, it's not developed by one company and then owned by one company.
Because as we see now, more and more, there's more and more actions down towards protectionism of the genetic material. So just an example, there's things that is called the Nagoya protocol, that's a protocol that was signed by numerous countries, like most in the World Health Science, and this protocol protects genetic material from one country. So even when we studied coffee from Kenya, and we did deep green coffee analysis to really look into the many compounds of the green coffee that are the metabolomic analysis or the metabolized of the coffee as a result of it, that could be interpreted as a result of genetic property or the genetic profile of this plant, we were most, we were required to clear for this protocol and pay some money to the organization to be able to do this research. So there's paperwork hurdles even there.
So there's a lot of protectionism and I have a strong, quite a strong suspicion that if something is developed by a corporate that it will be protected to give their profits high. Yeah, similar to what happened with Monsanto and the soybeans. You know that story, right? It's a very similar kind of thing.
That's how under threat coffee is. Can we talk about money with regards to innovation? So a lot of innovation requires money because it requires a lot of research, it requires a lot of testing. We haven't really talked about testing very much with regards to the scientific method, but I'd like to kind of, testing requires a lot of money in backing.
Am I correct? It does require, yes. It requires more than what people usually think. That's what I would like to speak on.
Can you talk more about what testing behind proving a product is and what kind of funding we're looking at when we're talking about taking a product to market? Not necessarily numbers. I can speak on the scientific part. That's what I mean.
Of course, taking a product to the market is a lot more than just doing the research behind but just from the innovation side. Let's go into perhaps since we are the topic of the farming. I think when we look at these grants that are funding this scientific research to produce new hybrids and new varieties, I think for a lot of those studies, we're talking about probably seven-figure numbers of the grants for multi-year projects. So this is not cheap.
It requires expensive equipment, expensive laboratories, it requires trained personnel doing a lot of hours, and even if there's no students involved, there's PhD students, it's still very expensive. The knowledge is very valuable. If they are able to get that proven, if it passes all of that, something like what we're talking about solves an economic problem of that gantuan scale, correct? It does solve, yes.
It does solve the economic problem. I would say it's not really solving it immediately. It's mitigating it because we don't have the problem now. The crisis is coming up, in this case, of the plant science, right?
Can you solve a gigantic problem with the innovation in coffee? Apart from the plant, from the farming, I think the industry is doing pretty well. The innovation has been super strong. A lot of things have been developed in the recent times, and right now, I don't see a gigantic problem that we're facing to be solved, apart from what is happening from the production site on the farming, which is the origin is a huge problem.
In my humble opinion, I think it's the one problem that is the hugest problem in the industry, and not enough attention is being paid on it, and the corporates are leading with the funding of that problem, which means they're going to own the solution, which then creates a whole other problem. Yeah, that's just happening. That's the fact. Perhaps it's not known publicly, but there's enough information around public information that we can make sure to say this is happening.
Everyone's too worried about winning the world's worst competition to care about those problems, though. Yeah, I mean, that's a whole other thing. I mean, we should also look from another point of view, this problem, because what this studies and corporates, what they want to have, they want to have high volumes of coffee produced at low cost. Okay, so we're doing it with monoculture, with automation, sorry, mechanization, hopefully automation also in the future.
We have the coffee pickers that shake the trees, and some people told me that apparently you can quite well adjust the intensity of the shaking, so that you can selectively just take the right ones, the right cherries, and then you go through multiple times. So these things that are happening on some scale of farming, which are kind of really modern in this monoculture farms, which is great for the farming, but still does not solve the issue with the three resilience. Well, and you can't solve the tree resilience if you don't solve what's happening in the soil. Now in the soil, that's also another thing.
The soil erosion, the fertilizer cost, it's also a huge carbon footprint from the fertilizer, right? When you use fertilization like this, so there's a lot of issues there. But what, I think where specialty coffee should be a great example to the commercial coffee, which is doing it really right, is that a lot of specialty coffee, specialty coffees are not found this way. Right.
You know, you can have, there's a lot of specialty coffees where you can, as a consumer, select what kind of beans you buy, or although you still need to do a bit of yourself research about the origin, many or most specialty coffee roasters nowadays, they have a farm on the back right for single origin. But it doesn't say what type of farming it is. And so, you know, is it monoculture? Is it like in a tropical rain forest or how is it?
But if you, if you do this and you really support only this kind of coffee that you drink, I think there's no risk right now for a ravica, because the way how these farms are done, there's like much more difference in the, in the distance between trees, so that the leaves don't spread so easily. You have, you know, there's solar erosion, if you have different crops planted together, the solar erosion can be lower. Of course, this can be also done in a monoculture way to farm to some extent. But then we go to really biodynamic growing and in the tropical forest, I think there, I don't see that there will be a risk for, for the plant from the, from the site of, you know, of the climate change tests and diseases.
There is the risk of the social part, right? Because there you really need to do hard work on the farm. And I've heard from coffee farmers to say that told me, somehow that's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, when I went to the coffee farming. It's so hard, there's so much work, all the everybody needs to do so much work.
And yeah, I think that's whatever is done this manually with hard work, it will still stay, it will be there. We should not think that what we're talking about in this, in 10 years we'll have a crisis of a ravica coffee that the ravica coffee will be gone. I think what will happen is if there's a huge crisis, the prices will go up insanely even more than they went up now. And there will be only mostly specialty coffee left, it will be less for the regular coffee drinker.
I've said this many times on the podcast and usually I guess there's like, what do you mean by access? I'm saying that the currency of the future with regards to a ravica coffee is going to be access, because it's going to be in short supply. And farmers will not be just making decisions based on price, they'll be making decisions based on who they want to sell to. And they will have the luxury to be able to make that decision, because this is not a pretend crisis, it's legitimate.
Whoever is going to buy their ravica is going to realize this is now a luxury product. And we are headed that way. This is already happening. This is already happening.
I know farmers that already select who they're selling to. They told me so there is happening. Of course, then the extreme is when you go to auctions, right, because then the prices go to some- Disgusting ridiculous. I mean, of course, if I would say that I don't mind if somebody has so much money, they want to give it to others.
That's great. But the objective social problem is that the money is then put selectively to certain farmers in disproportionate high levels. I'm not going to judge if this is fair or not. I mean, they must have been doing an amazing job at farming to get to this point.
But we shouldn't then say that, oh, because of coffee prices are so high, and there's look at so many coffees that are so expensive, it's great for these farmers, because they produce coffee for so much, because of their quality that are so high or that they know how to market themselves very well. But they're only a really, really tiny, tiny proportion of all the people who work in coffee. And then when people tag the idea of quality to price and say, well, because somebody paid $30,000 a kilo, that means that that must be a high quality coffee. Or if they've paid $4,000 a kilo, then that's not as good a quality, but it's still high quality.
Just side note folks, that's not science either. That's objective, not objective quality either. That's not objective. I mean, quality is really often not objective.
I mean, that's also a question what are people paying? I don't think the people are paying only for the quality. It's marketing. They're marketing, they're paying for the story, they're paying for the their own promotion by this.
Maybe they're showing off that they have money. I don't know, there must be other reasons. People are socials. Everybody has their own, we're individuals, we have everybody around ideas about what should we do with money, when we talk about money.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's fine. Or we shouldn't blame people for doing this.
No, but we should understand what it is when it's happening, right? We shouldn't be conflating, confusing that if something is purchased for a very high price, then that must be the definition of what quality is because of the names that are associated with it. People, I think in our industry, need to get much better at understanding the difference between what is marketing and hype and what is actual quality. Again, we go back to the tools.
People are spending money on something and because a lot of it sells, that creates this weird kind of momentum that if everybody is buying this tool, then it must be a quality tool, it must be something that everybody should be using. When in fact, the tool was not being sold because it was objectively solving a problem. It gained hype because somebody famous was selling it to you. A lot of the time, that's what happens in coffee.
Yeah, it happens. And not only coffee, not the industry as well. I mean, this is with this effect of fame. But my thing is here in our industry, we have a lot of inequity happening, inequality happening in the sense that you have people who have influence selling products to people who are not getting paid, very high wages, being told that they need this to do better at the job or being told that they need this to be better in their business.
And so it's not as though they're selling them something that's in their private life. They're telling them you will be better at brewing coffee or roasting coffee if you have this thing. And it's just objectively not provable. But then the hype is what drives that train.
And I would love to see people realize that you don't have to confuse your life with all of this shit that you don't need. Yeah, I mean, I'm really simplistic in how I make coffee myself. So I I use sometimes tools, but or things that are done, but more out of curiosity. I, yeah, it's really, yeah, I think it, I still think it's a personal decision.
But who should be having an oversight of what is like, product that works and product that doesn't work, that's always nobody, nobody should have the oversight, right? But we should, as an industry, be it's a soft governance kind of thing, right? Stop giving into peer pressure, stop buying something because somebody told you it was going to brew a better cup of coffee, when you're not going to realize that it doesn't until after you've purchased it. And so by that point, it doesn't really matter, because now you're being a part of the problem.
It's like enough is enough guys. How many different ways do we need to invent brewing coffee where you're pouring water over ground beans? How many different fucking ways do we need to do that? And the consumer is already stretched with regards to the way that they're approaching brewing coffee.
Anyway, people know my my ideas about that. Anyway, but what is a good point here is that maybe how does in the end, how these things are useful to consider? That's what we started to talk about in this one, and that there's things that are not directly useful to you. Many things that are happening in coffee, you know, what the research that we go back to what we started talking is the research on the all the varieties and the hybrids.
It's not useful to a specialty coffee drinker, and there's millions and millions and millions spent on this research. And these coffees are not what specialty coffee drinker wants. And also there's really a detachment of what is the need for certain parts of the industry. And it's the same as in tools.
Yeah, I mean, all these gadgets and tools, they are they're maybe great for somebody, but they're not something that you really need to make a good coffee because it's it's really more over and over. We see this more and more also in the data where we study coffee, what is really the most impactful on the quality of the flavor in the subjective point of view of the quality? Like what we like the most in specialty coffee. And in the end, it's the green coffee quality.
Yeah, you really want to pay for a good for a good coffee. And then you have a really good base to work with. And I don't mean for like high end, you know, I don't mean like this hundreds of dollars. I mean, those are great coffees.
But I don't mean this, you know, I mean, just going from a really coffee that does not have complexity that is flat to a coffee that is complex and nice and has good acidity. And there you really don't need tools and gadgets and fancy machines to already have a tasty cup of coffee. That's optional. Coffee should sing on its own.
Yeah. And then these are optional things to geek out to the test and maybe improve, look, you know, look to this last big optimum flavor. But you shouldn't be feel forced to do it because even just a simple brew with the most simple method can give a tasty coffee. Yeah.
And I'm pretty sure that the people who listen to this podcast are not the kind of people who get sucked down that rabbit hole. And, you know, I'm proud of that. Anyway, next episode, folks, we're talking about what is and what isn't innovation in coffee. Perfect segue.
Join us for the next episode. Peace, love and peanut butter. Have an amazing rest of your day. This episode is part of a five part series produced by MAPA Forward.
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