VIETNAM HIGH QUALITY COFFEE: AN APPROACH FROM THE COFFEE VALUE CHAIN AND THE IMPORTANCE OF COFFEE CUPPPING

Abstract

Coffee is one of the most popular drinks and it is the 2nd rank of exchanged goods in the world, after crude oil. The quality of coffee plays an important role and the producers always trying to adapt the consumers’ need. Quality standard of coffee is a key to affect on price of exchanging. In Vietnam, the highly quality coffee has been in the list of national products since 2017. It revealed that coffee is one of important Vietnamese agricultural goods. In fact, the quality of coffee was affected by several factors including genetics (species and varieties), agronomy, and harvesting method, post-harvest treatments, roasting and cupping technology. Establishing coffee quality control system in coffee value chain from farm to cup plays an important role to determine the authencity and traceablity of those products to assure the best high quality. This system built to evaluate frequently the coffee quality criteria (physiochemical characterestics and sensory properties) by harvesting time, seasons, geographical regions of Arabica and Robusta coffeee. In those quality control database, the coffee cupping scores evaluated by standards (international and national norms) are an important criteria to coffee grading that decides the price of buying/selling coffees. The goal of this paper suggests the solutions to improve the quality of Vietnamese coffee and establishes the national brandnames for high quality coffee, specialty coffee in current time and highlighs the importance of coffee cupping data. The main contents of this paper include: (1) fromseed-to-up scenero of coffee chain, (2) coffee standards system and high quality specialty coffee cupping test, (3) criteria and to build up coffee cuppers in factory, company and (4) finally to suggest the important improving steps towards the high value of Vietnamese coffee in future. We hope that this paper  is a useful reference help coffee production units understand the whole picture about the affected factors in coffee value chain. From that, the role of sensory coffee cuppers to set up the standard of high quality products is very important.