Cross-cultural taste: Exploring sensory language disparities in coffee evaluation for the global market

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Anthropology

Cross-cultural taste

Exploring sensory language disparities in coffee evaluation for the global market

Português

Sabor intercultural: Explorando disparidades de linguagem sensorial na avaliação de café para o mercado global

Cross-cultural taste: Exploring sensory language disparities in coffee evaluation for the global market

Introduction

The Cross-cultural taste project takes an interdisciplinary approach to addressing the difficulties faced by coffee producers in selling specialty coffee to the European market by assessing divergences in the sensory language and references used by professional Brazilian and British coffee tasters under experimental conditions and through anthropological methods.

Cross-cultural taste is funded (2024-2025) through a Scottish Funding Council International Scientific Partnership ODA grant in collaboration with the State University of Campinas (Brazil).

About the project

Brazil is the world’s largest coffee producer and exporter, and a growing sub-set of this coffee is ‘specialty coffee’—high-quality coffee that has unique flavours and tastes, now accounting for nearly 15% of Brazilian coffee exports. While specialty coffee commands much higher prices on the international market than conventional coffees, it presents more difficulties in logistics and getting to market in the first place as it requires producers and brokers to communicate elements of value: what is special and unique about this coffee and, consequently, worth a higher price?

Grounded in a sensory anthropology of food but paired with experimental sensory science work, our team is looking at how professional coffee tasters in Brazil and the UK develop and deploy sensory references and how embodied tasting practices convey meaning and value within the global coffee industry.

About the team

Dr Sabine Parrish - Principal investigator/qualitative lead

Sabine is an anthropologist with a particular research interest in the cultures and political economy of specialty coffee consumption and the environmental futures of coffee production. She is an Interdisciplinary Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Aberdeen. Outside of academia, Sabine has also worked professionally with coffee for over 15 years and is an experienced coffee taster.

Prof Jorge Behrens - Co-investigator/sensory science lead

Jorge Herman Behrens is a professor of Sensory and Consumer Science at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil. His research focuses on sustainability, the psychological and cultural motivations behind food choices (e.g., food neophobia), sensory preferences, crossmodal interactions, and the study of iconic foods such as coffee, a cornerstone of Brazil's national identity and a key element of its international cultural representation.

Dr Fabiana Carvalho - Co-investigator

Fabiana is a neuroscientist specialized in processes of perception and memory. She is currently a collaborating researcher at the State University of Campinas. Her research project ‘The Coffee Sensorium’ is focused on understanding multisensory flavour perception and how it impacts the coffee drinking experience. This project has several collaborators, such as the Coffee Science Foundation and the University of Oxford.

Dr Janelle Wagnild - Statistician

Janelle is a health anthropologist and an expert in quantitative and mixed methods. Since completing her PhD at Durham University in 2019, she has been a statistician on a diverse range of projects, including clinical trials in cardiothoracic surgery and nationally-representative surveys of medicine use in sub-Saharan Africa. She is currently the lead statistician on an MRC-funded intervention for community health workers in Ghana, Ethiopia, and Malawi.

Camila Arcanjo - Technical support staff

Camila holds a bachelor’s in Chemistry and a master’s degree in Food and Nutrition, both from the State University of Campinas. She runs the sensory laboratory Co.F.F.e.C.C.I.Na in partnership with the São Paulo State Coffee Industry Union (Sindicafé).