Talking trade, I feel that what the other side asks for has changed. A few years ago, "where is it from, what does it score" moved the conversation along. Now one thing is added: "Can you show the plot where this bean grew, as map coordinates?" This article is about one point: that how it was made has become something that can be proved. Two forces, regulation and technology, are pushing at once. The argument about terroir is in From where it was grown to how it was made, and the question of price in The era in which "who made it, and where" carries a price.
The biggest is the EUDR (EU Deforestation Regulation). Coffee imported into the EU now requires due diligence, proof of legality, including the geographic coordinates of the plot where it was grown. A country name is not enough; you must show which farm and how it was made. In origins like Ethiopia, national traceability systems are being built to meet this demand (Ethiopian coffee, Future Foods 2025). The text of the regulation and its costs are in EUDR seen from a small farm, so I will not repeat them here.
(This part is public data.)
Regulation said "show it", and technology answered "it can be checked". This is the core of the change. With near-infrared spectroscopy and chemometrics, the processing method (washed, natural, honey, anaerobic and others) can be identified from green beans with high accuracy, usable for verification of method, fraud prevention and traceability (Sheibani et al., 2024). Origin, too, can be distinguished with high accuracy by terahertz spectroscopy and machine learning (Xu et al., 2021). So we have entered an era in which "it says natural, but is it" and "is it the origin on the label" can be checked by a third party in numbers. Honesty of labelling counts more than ever. A troublesome era for beans sold on story; a tailwind for beans sold on record.
We do not compete on scale. Instead we have kept how we made things in numbers. For each lot, besides origin and variety, we record the pH at which fermentation was stopped and the moisture after drying. This was not for regulation; it was what we needed to reproduce the same taste next year. As it turns out, an era has come in which that record passes as proof. Neither regulation nor technology changes what we have been doing. They only changed its value.
We take the numbers not for future proof but first for ourselves, next year.
For the specifics and costs of EUDR see EUDR seen from a small farm; for terroir, From where it was grown to how it was made; for price, The era in which "who made it, and where" carries a price; for Asian origins, The end of the era of Asian coffee as cheap raw material; for what the records contain, What is the Data Bank.
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