Q&A: Michael Sheridan on the Power of Processing

by

Features

STiR Coffee and Tea: An article by Coffee Intelligence discusses how processing is overtaking origin as a way to communicate flavor. Why do you think processing is becoming the more dominant coffee language?

Michael Sheridan: Processing is having a moment, and we have a curriculum whose time has come. CQI’s mission is to improve the quality of coffee and the lives of the people who produce it. I think our Post-Harvest Processing (PHP) program is a way for CQI to really advance its mission by leaps and bounds.

For the first 30 years, CQI’s main tool for advancing our mission was the Q Grader program. We succeeded in creating a common language of quality where none existed before. But as you know, cupping doesn’t directly improve coffee quality. It improves people’s ability to perceive, identify, and characterize quality, but not to create it.

So the Q itself is an important tool, but it’s just one tool. The PHP program gives us the ability to really put our thumb on the scale of quality. As people start to understand processing, they begin to see how central it is to flavor formation and cup quality. Our work in educating, training, testing, and certifying professionals, as well as washing stations and mills, directly supports our mission in a new way, which is thrilling.

 STiR: Is processing a way for producers to differentiate themselves and enter new markets?

Sheridan: I think there is a new appreciation for processing because of what has been called the processing revolution. Processing is ascendant today, in a way that varietal lots were 15 years ago.

The way I think about coffee has evolved over the years. My focus has shifted from reward to risk. Pursuing reward through innovation is important, but it entails risk. As a buyer for Intelligentsia, I worked hard to balance these factors to create real incentives for innovation and increase rewards in the supply chain. But also doing it in a way that hedged the risk for everybody.

Beginning with a producer who is, in most cases, the least able to bear risk — that is something that I think about in the context of this question, since all innovation and experimentation entails risk. It’s important, as we continue on this path of collectively innovating, experimenting, and pushing the frontiers of flavor and understanding, that we do so in a way that protects people, mostly producers, from the risk that’s inherent in innovation.

There are ways to do that by structuring small lots and pilots, making the first one or two about learning and refinement before scaling. This is an important aspect of CQI’s courses and education. We focus on the science, but recognize that we also need to consider the business aspects of innovation. So we teach that in our courses, with the goal that the industry adopts those practices as well.

STiR: How does focusing on processing further CQI’s ultimate mission of not only improving coffee quality but also farmer livelihoods?

Sheridan: We’re going to create better flavors, fewer off-flavors, fewer rejections, and more premiums. But at the same time, we want to work to help people adopt practices that will reduce the risk to the whole innovation system.

People think of CQI as an educational organization, and we certainly are. But we are also a development organization that works on the ground with producers to implement these practices in the field.

Beginning with those good practices, you’re trying to scale and generalize them across the board — hedging risk across the entire industry. That’s what we did for over twenty years with the Q.

People weren’t speaking the same language before the Q. They couldn’t understand each other. But the Q helped us reach a place where there was enough alignment for trade to function and people to understand each other. CQI made a generational commitment to do that, and we succeeded.

The PHP program is our next-generation commitment. We will be there to support this journey and build processes that gradually reduce off-flavors and processing-related rejections by first establishing good practices. Then build up to a level of expertise and depth of knowledge where people can begin training others to structure experiments — so we can move into some of the edgier, more revolutionary aspects of processing.

STiR: Would you say coffee is evolving in a way similar to wine, where the winemaker is as important as the vineyard?

Sheridan: I think that is absolutely what’s happening in coffee. And it’s incredibly exciting because of the value that it can command in the marketplace. Processing can be a disproportionately important part of people’s ability to establish their reputations, command value, and gain recognition.

Coffee isn’t as mature as the wine industry. The number of coffee farmers and farms recognized in a similar manner is limited. And it tends to be limited to mid- to large-sized, quality-focused estates. That's great for coffee, and it’s a great place to start.

STiR: What is processing’s role within that?

Sheridan: The fact that processing can, so dramatically and in a concentrated part of the whole coffee cycle, create such distinctive and discernible flavor profiles can make it like a calling card. It’s a way to very quickly establish a reputation. But you have to manage the risks. Do you have the market channels to bring experimental coffees to market? Those are big ifs, and we want to be involved with fostering the kinds of relationships in which people innovate responsibly.

As long as producers understand that there’s a market for whatever those other profiles are, postharvest processing innovation is really exciting and can accelerate a farm or estate’s ability to break through and become price makers instead of price takers in the market.

STiR: During the annual CQI luncheon at World of Coffee San Diego, you spoke about the need to increase the number of educators and partners at origin. How do you plan on doing that?

Sheridan: We have educators and partners. Let me talk first about educators. I mentioned earlier that CQI is an educational and development organization. On the education side, what we did with the Q and replicated for the PHP program was effectively to create a market, an ecosystem for coffee education that involved the identification, training, testing, and certification of instructors, who are coffee education entrepreneurs.

There is then a private marketplace for the CQI courses these educators can enter. We have historically struggled to build robust market systems or coffee education ecosystems in the places where coffee grows. But we are working hard to remedy that. As we continue to build and expand our system, CQI’s ability to scale will really be determined by the breadth and quality of our educator network, so we’re actively working on it.

It is a little different for the PHP program because there are cupping labs everywhere there’s coffee, but there aren’t mills everywhere. There are only mills in the places where coffee is produced. So the expertise and knowledge are right there, closer to origin. We have a Global Coffee Fund that invests in expanding access to education and helps develop more coffee educators. An important part of that is the provision on the supply side, and making our system more representative, more robust, and more present in the places where coffee is grown and where this education really needs to take root.

On the partner side, our partnership agenda at origin is the development side of the organization. How do we identify organizations in coffee-growing regions that share our mission and values and are committed to coffee education? Over the years, we have had a partnership platform around the world, a network of In-Country Partners. Most of those have been in origin countries.

I think the conversations we’ve had around new projects for our Global Coffee Fund have really regarded our In-Country Partners as partners of preference as we begin to mobilize our own project investments. As more and more donor funding comes online, whether that’s industry funding or a return to publicly funded international development work, we see a real role for those organizations in helping us implement and get the work done on the ground in collaboration with our educator network.

Overall, CQI has a very clear focus on origin. We’re unique in our mandate on origin. But we are also very clear that the coffee supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link — an old adage that’s stuck around because it’s true.

We want to do things at origin that are relevant to producers and improve the quality of coffee they produce. But the livelihood part, the ability to translate those quality gains into better lives, really depends on what the market is doing. So, in everything we do, we need to ensure we’re market-aligned.

The Q was a great example of that; it was something the industry desperately needed. And it was something origins desperately needed to participate in value and price discovery as equals. With postharvest processing, I think there’s a very clear demand on the supply side for improving quality.

STiR: Who do you see investing in processing education at the moment?

Sheridan: We are working to achieve deeper engagement with the industry and a more partnership-based approach to investment in processing on the industry side than we’ve had in the past. I think much of the education work that was done with the Q was funded indirectly by industry, not by grants to CQI, but by companies investing in the education and certification of not just their employees but also their suppliers.

And that’s happening less with processing, which is interesting to me. Because I think of how much risk there is and how much opportunity for improvement there is in processing. The places where coffee is processed are the highest leverage opportunities for risk mitigation and quality improvement.

That’s not a cupping lab. That’s a processing center. It’s a washing station or a mill. And it seems like an ounce of prevention is worth way more than a pound of cure. Because once a green coffee doesn’t meet the standard, there’s very little that can be done about it.

I’m excited about the early uptake we’ve had over the last year from the industry, but there’s a lot of room for growth in our industry partnerships to embed CQI processing education and certification in supply streams, as the Q has been over the last twenty years. I hope we can get somewhere close to that.