Coffee please, hold the moldy beans and twigs
by Katy McLaughlin, Wall Street Journal
"The Arizona Republic" Newspaper Phoenix 12/01/02

Coffee prices are at their lowest level in decades. So why does so much of the coffee you buy taste so bad?

Falling global prices should be a godsend. Better beans at lower prices, but much of the coffee you buy is worse than ever. This year, coffeemakers are increasingly substituting low-quality beans in their ground coffee for high-quality beans, according to the International Coffee Organization, a global trade group.

In addition, the purity of the average cup of coffee -- the ratio of debris like twigs and rotten beans to actual fresh beans -- has shifted markedly in the unappetizing direction over the past two years.

In fact, quality has gotten so poor that in recent weeks, the agency issued new rules requiring coffee-exporting countries to improve their product -- or stop selling it.

That is the good news for consumers because the new standards are significantly higher than the U.S. government's own rules: Food and Drug Administration rules essentially permit unripe or moldy beans, gravel and other junk to constitute as much as 30 percent of a cup of "pure" coffee, industry experts say.

The falling prices on the global coffee market are having a direct impact on the coffee you drink. Kraft Foods, maker of Maxwell House, says its second-largest supplier of coffee is now Vietnam, which grows some of the cheapest and lowest-quality beans in the world. (Kraft's largest supplier is Brazil, and second-largest used to be Colombia.)

Kraft and other major coffee companies say they have in house purity standards for the coffee they buy that are more stringent than the FDA's, but they declined to provide specifics.

In addition Kraft and other big users of Vietnamese beans, including Sara Lee and Procter & Gamble, makers of Hills Bros. and Folger's respectively, declined to disclose which of their blends include lower-quality beans.

Analysts say many of the best-selling supermarket brands have replaced the high-quality Arabica beans they used to buy from regions like Colombia, Guatemala and Costa Rica with low-quality beans from other countries.

The quality problem affects the vast majority of coffee sold in the United States because almost all coffee sold here is either pre-ground or instant, the two types most likely to contain debris or bad beans.

"Specialty" coffee -- the kind sold in whole beans or, say, cafe frappuccinos -- has only about 15 percent of the market, despite increasing popularity of coffee bars. That is partly because many of the drinks sold in specialty shops contain little actual coffee: They are mostly milk, sugar and flavorings.

Meantime, big supermarket brands, neighborhood delis, coffee vending machines -- and, of course, the companies that stock American companies' office percolators -- compete with each other not so much on taste as on price.

In fact, for the past several years, coffee companies have been increasingly mixing in cheaper beans because of price. The current flood of bad coffee on the global market has taken an already-poor product down another notch.

Despite the proliferation of coffee choices, there are only two basic bean types: Arabica is generally the best, while Robusta, is cheaper and less tasty.

Vietnam is fast becoming the Robusta king. In the past five years, that country has come out of almost nowhere to emerge as the world's third largest coffee producer, behind only Brazil and Colombia.

In coffee, "there are two kinds of off tastes," said Kenneth David, a coffee taster and industry consultant. One is a "compost" taste, and the other is "old shoes in the back of the closet," he said. "Vietnamese Robusta combines both."

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