Coffee Shortage May Lead to Unwanted Ingredients: New Test for Purity

How pure is your coffee? It may not just be coffee beans that are going into your morning cup. Scientists have found that there may be surprise ingredients acting as fillers, and that they may increase in the future as coffee shortages grow.

Coffee shortages are growing in regions such as Brazil, where droughts and plant diseases have dramatically cut back coffee supplies. This provides extra incentive for coffee growers to add fillers to ground coffee to make it go farther and increase profits. In fact, a 2012 study estimated that about 70 percent of the world's coffee supply might disappear by the year 2080 due to conditions caused by climate change.

"With a lower supply of coffee in the market, prices rise, and that favors fraud because of the economic gain," said Suzana Lucy Nixdorf, one of the researchers, in a news release.

That's why scientists decided to design a test in order to see whether coffee was pure or being tampered with. After grinding, unfortunately, it becomes almost impossible to see any difference between grains of lower cost incorporated into the coffee. In order to create the test, they analyzed several fillers that are considered as impurities rather than adulterants. The impurities could even be parts of the coffee plant included during harvest, such as wood, twigs, sticks, parchment, husks, whole coffee berries or even clumps of Earth.

"With our test, it is now possible to know with 95 percent accuracy if coffee is pure or has been tampered with, either with corn, barley, wheat, soybeans, rice, beans, acai seed, brown sugar or starch syrup," said Nixdorf.

The new test involves using liquid chromatography and statistical tools. This gives researchers a much closer look at the ingredients in coffee in an unbiased way. The scientists plan to develop a "characteristic fingerprint" when using chromatography that separates out the real coffee compounds.

The findings reveal a new way to test coffee, which could be important in the future. Already, the world is feeling a coffee shortage. Although Brazil typically produces 55 million bags of coffee each year, the projected amount for 2014 will likely only reach 45 million bags. This could mean that fillers may be used and if so, it will be important to have a test to make sure coffee remains pure.

The findings will be presented at the 248^th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.