SCA Continues Global Advance of CVA through Brazil Specialty Coffee Association Deal

BSCA President Carmem Lucia Chaves de Brito with SCA CEO Yannis Apostolopoulos. SCA press release photo.

The Specialty Coffee Association is continuing to march forward its new professional coffee cupping system — known as the CVA — through a new deal with the Brazil Specialty Coffee Association (BSCA).

Leaders of the two influential nonprofit organizations signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) at the recent Specialty Coffee Expo in Houston, making the announcement of a “strategic partnership” nearly two weeks later, on May 8.

The handshake deal with the BSCA follows a similar partnership commitment between the SCA and the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC) that was signed on April 25 in Houston.

According to the SCA, the newest agreement involves the BSCA’s adoption of the CVA as the “official protocol” for professional coffee quality evaluation throughout Brazil. In addition to the CVA adoption, the agreement calls for the BSCA to lead the expansion of SCA education programming in Brazil.

The Brazil announcement also comes less than two weeks after the SCA announced it was taking over the Q Grader program, the flagship education, certification and quality-evaluation platform of the nonprofit Coffee Quality Institute.

Combined, these three agreements may come to mark a monumental moment of consolidation in the global coffee industry regarding how coffee quality is assessed and communicated. In turn, they may prove to have widespread implications for how coffee is valued and priced in the global marketplace.

Daily Coffee News photo by Nick Brown.

The SCA officially adopted the CVA — which stands for Coffee Value Assessment — last November, replacing the 2004 legacy cupping form that can still be found in hundreds of roasteries and cupping labs today. According to the SCA, which is the world’s largest coffee trade organization, the CVA’s set of forms and protocols is designed to provide a more holistic view of a coffee’s value, accounting for both intrinsic and extrinsic attributes.

While day-to-day adoption of the CVA among working coffee professionals has not been widespread, the SCA is clearly signaling its intentions to push the cupping platform forward as the global standard.

Agreements with coffee leaders in Brazil and Colombia — the world’s two largest producers of Arabica coffee, each with an outsize influence on green coffee markets — serve to accelerate that effort.

“Brazil’s endorsement of the Coffee Value Assessment is a powerful signal to the global coffee community,” SCA CEO Yannis Apostolopoulos said in an announcement of the deal with the BSCA. “Together with BSCA, we are laying the foundation for a more transparent, inclusive, and informed coffee industry. This is how we make coffee better — for producers, for buyers, and for coffee lovers around the world.”

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