We’re evolving the tool the global coffee industry uses to discover value in coffee.

Meet the SCA Coffee Value Assessment

Launched at Specialty Coffee Expo Portland in 2023, the Coffee Value Assessment offers a complete, “high-resolution” picture of a specific coffee across four assessment types, completed separately to avoid bias.

Driven by the SCA’s sustainability agenda, which emphasizes equitable value distribution throughout the supply chain, the system aspires to be a powerful tool to help measure and facilitate value assessment and distribution. It simultaneously integrates advances in sensory and coffee science, making it compatible with scientific research for the first time, as well as learnings from a large user-perception research project conducted with the specialty coffee community.

Despite its broad reach within the coffee sector, the 2004 SCA cupping system had not been thoroughly investigated or substantially updated since its creation—and the SCA is committed to improving its tools to improve market access and equity throughout the specialty coffee supply chain. The new Coffee Value Assessment, an evolution of the 2004 SCA Cupping and Grading Protocol guided by the results of a user perception survey of 1600 cuppers worldwide, has been in testing with groups of cuppers in Latin America, Europe, and the US in 2022.

We invite you to join us at Specialty Coffee Expo to get involved in the next steps of the SCA Coffee Value Assessment. Below are a list of lectures, workshops, and other events at Expo that attendees can attend to learn more about this new initiative at such an early stage. Attendees are also welcome to register as Early Adopters to contribute to the continued process of learning and discovery.