11 Minutes read

By Ali Johnston

North America Lab Coordinator

The harvesting of coffee cherry is a labor-intensive process that also requires an extraordinary amount of precision. Coffee farmers continually battle the same conundrum: Should they harvest higher yields, including overripe and under-ripe cherries, at the risk of producing a potentially lower quality? Or should they harvest lower yields, picking only perfectly ripe cherries, at a potentially higher quality? This productivity-versus-quality debate is a constant in the life of a coffee farmer.

Caravela Coffee sought to find some solutions to this ongoing issue and posed the following questions:

• Can cup quality be maintained or even improved by allowing varying degrees of ripeness within the middle of the color spectrum?
• Is it possible to save coffee farmers time and money through identifying a range of acceptable ripeness levels and bypassing the selective picking stage?