People drink about 2 billion cups of coffee every day, making it one of the most popular drinks in the world. The British Coffee Association estimates that people in the United Kingdom (UK) are responsible for 95 million of those cups. Coffee is also responsible for about 200,000 jobs; 16% of the people in the UK frequent a coffee shop dally.
While food adulteration is done for profit, some adulterants can be harmful if consumed. There are several cases of contaminated baby milk and rice leading to health scares, and in some cases, death. Adulteration can occur at any point during the harvest process to retail sales. All you need for a cup of coffee is ground coffee and water, but the beans that make those grounds are complex, have many varieties, and must be roasted at the right temperature. There are two main kinds of coffee beans: Robusta and Arabica, with the latter being used to make the premium coffee brew.
Just like any hot commodity, coffee is vulnerable to fraud. In some cases, cheap coffee is used to replace more expensive coffee, and there are stories of wheat and barley being used as filler in ground coffee. A recent study in Spain uses chromatography to detect coffee adulteration. The results of the study are published in the journal, Foods.
The researchers in Spain looked at ways of detecting coffee fraud. The team utilized a high-performance liquid chromatography with UV detection (HPLC-UV) for characterization, classification, and authentication of coffee samples by production region, variety, and roasting temperature. Their methods were able to find the necessary chemical descriptors to be able to classify the coffee samples.