From Value to Values: Determining the Worth of Coffee | 25, Issue 19
Anthropology Professor EDWARD F. FISCHER, author of Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third- Wave Tastemakers Create Value, explains the different types of value, ways of determining worth, and how we create economic value by drawing on other sorts of values (moral, social, political, and other cultural values) through the lens of his fieldwork in Guatemala.
In 2021, the SCA published a new, improved definition for specialty coffee. It reads as follows: “Specialty coffee is a coffee or coffee experience recognized for its distinctive attributes, and because of these attributes, has significant extra value in the marketplace.” The definition puts special emphasis on the idea of attributes, and the extra value these attributes create.
The question then becomes: how does the attributes–value relationship work in the real world? How can we move past abstract definitions to real understanding? A moment’s analysis reveals that the answer must be very complex: we value coffee for a variety of attributes—from flavor to stimulation to its role in global trade—and these attributes are valued according to a complex, very human, economic, and moral system. Fortunately, an academic discipline exists to study human complexity, the field of anthropology. And even more fortunately, there exists an accomplished anthropologist who has dedicated a large part of his career to asking exactly this question: how do humans value coffee?
Edward (Ted) Fischer is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, and he has recently published a book, Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third-Wave Tastemakers Create Value, in which he shares his decades of research on this essential topic of coffee value. As someone who has worked in specialty coffee for more than three decades, Fischer’s chosen subject—the coffee-producing country of Guatemala—was a familiar setting. I recognized the players: coffee producers who own farms of various sizes, coffee advocates who try to influence the coffee marketplace for the better, and coffee buyers from around the world seeking delicious coffee with— importantly—just the right story to tell. Fischer’s keen observational skill and ability to put trends into historical context helped me make sense of the peculiarities of specialty coffee in new ways. The experience of reading his book was electrifying, giving voice to the many actors in the coffee marketplace, illuminating their ambitions and intentions, and showing how their actions play out— for better or worse.
In this piece, Prof. Fischer distills his views on how value is created in coffee, and challenges our notions about the concept of value itself. It’s a fantastic, creative look at an important issue—and a succinct lesson in the evolution of value economics. In some ways, this piece feels so familiar—the journey Ted details here mirrors the SCA’s own journey in understanding during our long-term project to evaluate and evolve the cupping protocol—and it’s always affirming to see our work converge with respected scholars studying our industry.
Peter Giuliano
Chief Research Officer
“What is a coffee worth?” may seem like a straightforward question, calculated with basic arithmetic of supply, demand, production, and transportation costs, but the closer we look, the more complicated—even philosophical—the question becomes.
Think of the different economic values that go into a cup of coffee—the price of cherry sold at the farm, the cost of beans bought by a roaster, what you pay at your coffee shop. That cup also likely has other values attached, perhaps paying a fair-trade premium to support a moral value, perhaps responding to a claim about the values of terroir or the biography of the grower. There may also be emotional attachments: a comforting morning ritual or the sociability of sharing a moment with a friend. That coffee may invoke sensorial, affective values, the smell and taste triggering memories and associations. Then think also of what the beans that went into that cup mean to those who pick them, how they link to their life projects and moral worlds.
At the coffee shop, we are asked to pay more for quality. But for most customers, selection is akin to looking at a restaurant’s list of unfamiliar wines: the price indicates quality rather than the other way around. In the high- end world of craft coffee, purveyors emphasize quality in the cup—varietals and terroir, processing methods and roasting techniques— the material inputs that produce sought-after flavors. But who decides what flavors are sought after?
Beyond the qualities in the cup, consumers are also paying for other sorts of intangible values—a vicarious connection with the grower, the novelty of discovering something new, an appreciation of the craft, a moral commitment to fair trade, the sense of identity that goes along with being a coffee enthusiast.
We tend to think of economic value as “real” worth. This is partly because of a quest for financial gain, but it is also because market value is easy to calculate: with pounds and kilos, dollars and euros, we have solid metrics to work with, to compare unlike things. But what about justice, dignity, or love? Such values resist quantification, but are no less important; indeed, for most of us, they play a central role in our identity and sense of self. Such values rely on subjective measures of what is bad, better or worse—a gut feeling more than a mathematical calculation. The rub is that much of life is about balancing qualitatively different value worlds, translating moral values into economic values, or social values into political values—something we all wrestle with every day in our personal and professional lives.
Having spent the last decade tracing specialty coffee produced in the Maya highlands of Guatemala to roasters and cafés in the United States, uncovering how value is created along the way, it’s possible that I may have wrestled with this more than most. Before I share some of my findings and show how they speak to theories of value, you may be wondering: what theories of value?
Ways of Determining (Economic) Value
The specialty coffee industry has been grappling in recent years with how to determine value in a systematic way. The standard benchmark for prices in the coffee trade is the New York C price for washed arabica futures. In this bulk commodity world, a classification or grade determines value. This reduces the variation and unique properties of batches down to a simple category, the easier to trade with. As with a barrel of oil, it makes no difference who produced the particular beans, and any differences in taste are of no market consequence.
Yet, it has become clear that using the commodity price as a reference for specialty coffees is misleading at best, as they are traded on their unique properties. Then the question becomes how to account for the unique properties of specialty coffee in a valuation system. Peter Roberts and his team at Emory have developed the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide to document historic ranges of trading prices for specialty coffees. Building on this work, we may then ask what goes into determining the higher prices commanded by specialty coffee.
Once upon a time, it was thought that items had an intrinsic value, and even today many assume that certain things are inherently valuable—think gold, or diamonds, or cash. But, from a social science perspective, all of these are cultural conventions: we have decided they are valuable, which works as long as everyone shares that same belief. The field of valuation studies, which draws on economics, sociology, and philosophy, has identified several different approaches to the determination of value.
Early scholars, including Adam Smith and Karl Marx, saw economic value as ultimately deriving from labor (taking into account the aggregate labor inputs into all elements of production). This was a moral as much as an economic argument, recognizing the worth of human labor. All the same, as the specialty coffee market clearly demonstrates, value is not determined simply by adding up all of the labor costs.
That leads us to consider use-value, or utility. From this perspective, worth is determined by the benefit an item brings to the consumer. It makes sense that if something is very useful to me, then it is worth more than another item of lesser utility. Discussions of use-value generally focus on material utility. Coffee’s utility stems largely from its pharmacological properties. With its caffeine, coffee produces discernable effects on the body, heightening concentration, focusing attention, and increasing stamina and acuity. It makes us more productive, sharpening the mind and energizing the body. In short, it is useful.
Still, material utility can only tell us so much, or at least it is only one way to look at worth. Adam Smith grappled with this in his diamonds and water paradox: if economic value is based on material utility, then why do diamonds cost so much more than water? The exchange value, or price, of diamonds or luxury watches far exceeds their use-value. The same is true of specialty coffee, at least if we are just looking at its utility as a drug food. In high-end markets, price may be related to use-value, but it is not tethered to it. Conventional economic theory sees exchange value as a function of supply and demand: it is the scarcity of diamonds or rare coffees that make the prices so high. But that sidesteps the question of what creates demand, for not every scarce thing is desirable.
What if we considered use-value beyond the measurable material impacts? The pleasure that coffee brings, for example, comes not just from its biochemical properties, but also from more subjective and affective associations—a comforting warmth, fond memories, a sense of identity. In this way subjective utility is not simply a reflection of innate desires, but influenced by cultural vibes—vibes that partly, though not solely, emanate from marketing.
This led Carl Menger and Georg Simmel and others to argue that economic value comes from a subjective sense of worth. Such a perspective allows us to account for the subjective and symbolic values that contribute to price in specialty coffee: the origin backstory, the imagined relationship with a producer, moral and ethical ideals, the artisanry and craft of roasting. We should not dismiss these symbolic aspects as just marketing ploys (even if they can serve that purpose). They are real: social facts, conventions that we act on and make real.
When taste preferences come into the equation, it muddles the distinction between intrinsic material attributes and symbolic and cultural values. As with many foodstuffs, terroir has become a key element of value for high-end coffee, whose complex flavor profiles are especially sensitive to climate, moisture, and soil conditions.
Still, the creation of value in specialty coffee goes beyond terroir; there is also a whole apparatus of roasting, marketing, and brewing that fuels consumption. Coffee professionals as well as aficionados play an active role in defining what “quality” is, how a different taste becomes a more valued taste. The coffee world’s notion of “quality” strives for objectivity, but this can obfuscate the underlying truth that quality is not discovered but created, given form through the symbolic values of tastemakers. High-end coffee consumption may be understood as the realization of a certain symbolic value world, one that highlights a connection to the source and soil and eschews the mass-commodity for goods more singular and distinctive.
Producer Values
Beyond the income it produces, coffee also carries others sorts of value for producers. Using the case study of specialty coffees grown in the highlands of Guatemala and sold by specialty roasters in the US, my book Making Better Coffee shows how economic value is created by translating social, moral, and political values into dollars and cents. For generations, Maya farmers in Guatemala— pushed off their lands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—were forced to work under harsh conditions as seasonal migrant laborers on the large coffee plantations that took over their territory. In the 1990s and 2000s, the quality turn in the international coffee market shifted the situation dramatically. In a bit of poetic justice, the steep mountain slopes to which the Maya had been displaced are ideal for planting high-quality, high-altitude coffees. The quality turn in the consumer market produced a boom in many Maya communities as former plantation workers began to grow and sell their own coffee.
More recently, demand for specialty coffees has taken off. The subtle flavors of these coffees thrive in the high-altitude and micro-climates of the Maya highlands, commanding sometimes eye-popping prices. Yet, just as important as terroir distinctions are the symbolic values—the stories and cultural associations—constructed around the beans. Specialty coffee purveyors justify high margins by invoking geographic origins and authenticity as well as the science of sensory analysis. For producers to be successful in this context requires them to influence consumer narratives, to participate in discussions around quality. This leaves Maya farmers disadvantaged, as they largely lack the cultural and social capital needed to speak to the lucrative specialty market.
The localized moral value worlds of Maya coffee farmers sometimes converge and sometimes collide with the logic of the market economy. For most, coffee is seen not as a way to get rich, but as a significant source of income that can keep a family out of absolute poverty. Significantly, it also converges with cultural values around dignity and community. For Maya farmers, one of the most valued aspects of the specialty coffee boom is that it allows them to retain control over their land. Land is a form of economic security, but there is also a cultural dignity that goes with owning one’s own land. This is tied to a widespread sense that real wealth, meaning virtuously gained wealth, comes from the life-giving force of the earth.
The reality is that growing coffee is back- breaking work and Maya farmers mostly live in very modest circumstances, with limited resources and opportunities. They are acutely aware of the perils of dependency on fickle global markets. Yet, as they describe it, coffee represents an opportunity in a context of few opportunities, an imperfect but valued means to achieving their hopes, dreams, and desires for a good life.
Coffee’s Value Worlds
In the end, looking for a singular determinant of economic value is misguided, for it comes from the many different sources. The Specialty Coffee Association has recognized this as it develops a new coffee value assessment system. This is based on five aspects: 1) physical evaluation (green grading), 2) descriptive cupping, 3) affective cupping, 4) extrinsic values (including intangibles), and 5) a “value discovery tool” that aggregates the other variables based on customized preferences.
The “extrinsic values” category recognizes that coffee can store all sorts of values— material and economic as well as social and emotional. In this, we should also remember all the hidden lives that have touched the beans— quite literally—along the way to our cup.
Tastemakers often talk about “quality” as if it were an objective trait, in the case of coffee something to be found in out-of-the-way places (geographically, but also metaphorically). In fact, the designation of “quality” is constructed, and it changes over time. Coffee aficionados are earnestly pursuing a passion, trying to find new flavors and make supply chains more just. For Maya farmers, coffee fits into traditional understandings of cosmological and agricultural cycles of regeneration—as well as providing income to pursue their aspirations for a better life. The coffee trade is, of course, about beans and dollars, but that is only part of the story. It also importantly involves political ideologies, cultural meanings, and individual hopes and fears.
With high-end coffee, the construction of a narrative leading customers to pay extra for symbolic, moral, and imaginative values is crucial to coffee producers extracting the maximum economic value for their coffee. This requires translating the material properties of coffee grown in places like Guatemala into the cultural and moral narratives of Global North consumers. The real power in this system rests not in uncovering hidden sensory attributes (“discovering quality”), but in deciding what constitutes quality, and therefore what gets valued. This work of defining value belongs to us all, a realization that can empower us to make coffee better for those who drink it and those who grow it. ◇
EDWARD F. FISCHER is a Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, where he also holds appointments in the School of Management and the School of Medicine. His most recent book, Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third-Wave Tastemakers Create Value, was published by the University of California Press in 2022.
We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of 25, Issue 19. This issue of 25 is made possible with the contributions of specialty coffee businesses who support the activities of the Specialty Coffee Association through its underwriting and sponsorship programs. Learn more about our underwriters here.