THE CUPPING & QUALITY LAB:
THE HEART OF OUR BUSINESS

Quality is one of our cornerstones.
To that end, we’ve built a dedicated team of Green Coffee Quality Experts and Q Graders.
Coffee quality is the basis for our activities. We control this quality systematically to make sure coffee roasters,
connoisseurs and coffee lovers can taste and feel the love for coffee produced by our amazing farmer partners!

Ivan Lamilla Muñoz, Green Coffee Quality Expert and Q Grader, during a
Q Calibration course performed in October 2021 together with the Coffee Quality Institute
at our SEABRIDGE SCA Premier Training Campus in Zeebrugge, Belgium
What do we mean with coffee quality?

We systematically control coffee quality, at different levels and intervals throughout the supply chain, from harvest up to delivery.

To that end, we have several quality and cupping laboratories where coffee samples from around the world are checked and tasted.
Two of them are situated in Belgium: one in Antwerp and one at Belgium’s first SCA Premier Training Campus SEABRIDGE in Zeebrugge.

Here, samples of all coffee batches and varieties that EFICO can deliver or has delivered in the past are stored in the lab’s library.
This library has evolved into a treasure box for the coffee connoisseur.
CUPRIMA's Thibault Chauvin, performing sensorial evaluation with our KURU team in Ethiopia

CUPRIMA’s Thibault Chauvin, performing sensorial evaluation with our KURU team in Ethiopia

EFICO's Olivier Hermans, Q Arabica Grader, evaluating arrival samples

EFICO’s Olivier Hermans, Q Arabica Grader, evaluating arrival samples

When coffee is a passion, tasting becomes an art 

The sensorial appreciation that a consumer experiences is very personal.
All of our coffees sourced are cupped at several moments in the supply chain.

This detailed evaluation by our experienced Quality Control and Commercial Team includes physical, sensorial and micro-biological analysis.
Training 

Internal training sessions are set up to keep our team up-to-date on the knowledge in different coffee topics.
Cuppings according to SCA standards or in-house cupping sessions with clients around different themes and origins are organized to analyze and evaluate cup profiles, develop roasting profiles, blends, and so on.

At the SEABRIDGE lab, quality training sessions by our Q Graders are programmed, in partnership with the Coffee Quality Institute. Discover the updated training schedule soon here.

Our team also contributes to Cupping Coffee for Science ☕️ 🥄🔬🧪
End 2021, we participated in the World Coffee Research International Multi-Location
Variety Trial cupping experiment through a blind cupping of 18 different coffees.
No indication on origin or varieties. Our cupping reports were collected by WCR
together with the input from the rest of the participating partners, to feed a robust analysis of data.