Soluble coffees now have a specific methodology for their quality assessment. While other types of commercialized coffees already had their own methods of profile and quality analysis, soluble ones still did not have their own parameters for this. It was the brazilian industry that organized itself to create and show the market, in the last week, this innovation in the coffee industry.

The launch of the Protocol of Sensory Analysis of Soluble Coffee took place during the International Coffee Week (SIC), in Belo Horizonte, state of Minas Gerais. The technical document has been developed since 2019, in an initiative of the Brazilian Association of the Soluble Coffee Industry (Abics) and the Institute of Food Technology (Ital).

The project also has a worldwide disclosure made with the Brazilian Agency for The Promotion of Exports and Investments (ApexBrasil).

The goal is to change the way the market views and uses the product. With the avation and definition of categories, it will be possible, for example, to improve communication between manufacturers, companies and consumers.

The classification of soluble coffee

The methodology created in Brazil evaluates the quality by the intensity of the attributes and not by scores. The technical group came to the protocol after taking professional tests, the so-called cuppings, with different soluble samples produced in Brazil and abroad.

In the process, there was the meeting of the samples by flavor similarity and then described by the characteristic taste of each group. Some of the attributes indicated by the experts were sweetness, acidity, floral, chestnuts, spices, fruity, chocolate and bitterness. Based on the main attributes, the team developed a sensory lexicon for the product and, finally, the three degrees of quality for soluble: excellence, differentiated and conventional.

For the Director of Institutional Relations at Abics, Aguinaldo Lima, the new methodology is a paradigm shift, helping the public to value and rediscover soluble coffee. "Now we need to do our homework, that is, make our methodology applied by as many industry professionals as possible who are associated with Abics. We need to train more people."

Then it will be a consolidation and refinement of these courses. And at the moment we are training companies, they will invite international clients to take these courses within their own companies. As this is being disseminated, we have managed to consolidate our protocol and it ends up becoming a global language of analysis," Lima said in an interview with the Brazil-Arab News Agency website.

The director explains that Abics does not intend to have exclusivity in the application of courses of the methodology.

"We want this to be put by other institutions so that they host the course all over the world. It's more about proliferating the knowledge of the soluble," he continued.

Globalized

Brazil is the largest exporter of soluble, selling to more than 120 countries. The consumption of the product in the world grows more than 2% per year, according to Abics. National industries have auditioned for more than 25 different types of international certifications, including Halal, which attest that the product is proper for Muslim consumption.

According to Fábio Sato, president of Abics, who also participated in the launch, the Brazilian soluble industry remains optimistic, with investments in expanding production capacity and new technologies. For him, one of the great challenges is to transform this methodology of sensory analysis of soluble coffee into a global protocol.

Source: Canal Rural