In specialty coffee, we frequently use price, quality and value as though they were different ways of describing the same thing. A coffee sells for more, therefore we assume it must be better. A coffee receives a higher score, therefore we assume it must be more valuable. A rare cultivar appears at auction and commands an extraordinary price, and the price itself becomes evidence that the coffee must possess extraordinary value. The problem is that none of those relationships is automatic. Price, quality and value influence one another, but they describe different things, and much of the confusion surrounding specialty coffee begins when we stop distinguishing between them.

Price is the monetary amount required to obtain a product or service. It is measurable, visible and attached to a transaction. Value is much more complicated because it refers to the benefit, usefulness, meaning, quality or importance that someone attributes to what is received in relation to what must be given up to obtain it. Consumer researcher Valarie Zeithaml described this problem in her influential 1988 work on price, quality and value. Consumers, she found, do not define value in one universal way. Some understand value primarily as a low price, others as receiving the specific attributes they want, others as the relationship between quality and price, and still others as the broader balance between everything they receive and everything they sacrifice in the exchange. [1] This distinction is fundamental for coffee because a price can be placed on a bag before anybody buys it, while value only emerges when that coffee encounters a person, a business or a market that recognizes something in it as meaningful.

This is why asking, “How much is this coffee worth?” is often an incomplete question. The more useful questions are: worth to whom, for what purpose, and under what circumstances? A coffee does not pass through one value system on its journey from seed to beverage. It moves through many of them. The producer, exporter, importer, roaster, café and consumer may all interact with exactly the same coffee while assigning importance to entirely different characteristics.

Value Is Not One Thing

There is no single scientific taxonomy establishing an exact number of types of value. Different disciplines divide the concept differently because they are trying to understand different aspects of human behavior. In consumer research, Morris Holbrook proposed a framework containing eight forms of value: efficiency, excellence, status, esteem, play, aesthetics, ethics and spirituality. [2] The importance of Holbrook’s framework for our discussion is not that coffee must be forced into eight categories, but that it demonstrates how far value extends beyond objective product quality. Something can be valuable because it performs particularly well, because it provides pleasure, because it is aesthetically meaningful, because possessing it communicates status, because it reflects someone’s ethical priorities or because it carries personal or cultural significance.

Specialty coffee has developed a different framework through the Coffee Value Assessment. The SCA’s CVA does not claim that coffee possesses four “types of value.” Instead, it separates coffee assessment into four complementary areas: physical, descriptive, affective and extrinsic. [3] Physical assessment deals with measurable characteristics of the green coffee. Descriptive assessment records what we perceive sensorially without asking whether we like it. Affective assessment addresses the evaluator’s impression of quality and preference, while extrinsic assessment captures information that is not physically tasted in the beverage, such as origin, producer, processing information, certifications and traceability.

That separation is extraordinarily useful because it prevents us from trying to collapse everything a coffee represents into a single number. If I identify jasmine in a coffee, I am making a descriptive observation. If I find that jasmine character beautiful and desirable, I am making an affective judgment. If I know that the coffee came from a particular producer, farm, cultivar and agricultural system, I am dealing with extrinsic information. All of those elements can contribute to value, but none of them independently establishes what the coffee should cost.

For the purpose of discussing coffee, I find it more useful to think about value as having several overlapping dimensions: economic value, functional and quality value, sensory and affective value, experiential value, social and environmental value, and cultural and relational value. I am not proposing these as a new scientific classification. They are simply a practical way of understanding why two people can encounter the same coffee and reach completely different conclusions about what it is worth to them.

Coffee Moves Along A Continuum Of Differentiation

One of the ideas that originally interested me when I began thinking about price and value was the idea of a value continuum. At one end of that continuum, coffee can function almost as an interchangeable commodity. The buyer may know relatively little beyond broad origin, grade, availability and price, and differentiation is limited. As we move along the continuum, increasingly specific information becomes visible: country, region, farm, producer, species, variety or cultivar, harvest, processing method, physical quality, sensory characteristics, environmental practices, certifications and traceability. Eventually we arrive at extremely specific lots that may be differentiated not only by producer and geography but by cultivar, harvest selection, processing protocol or even a single production separation.

Differentiation can create additional value because it gives buyers and consumers more reasons to distinguish one coffee from another. But differentiation is not a staircase in which every additional attribute automatically adds value. A rare cultivar becomes valuable as rarity only when somebody cares that it is rare. Traceability creates additional value when the buyer considers traceability important. A certification contributes value when the consumer trusts the certification and cares about the issue it represents. An unusual sensory profile may be enormously desirable in one market and commercially difficult in another. The attribute exists in the coffee, but the value attributed to it depends on the person or market encountering it.

This broader understanding is reflected in the SCA’s current definition of specialty coffee, which recognizes a coffee or coffee experience for distinctive attributes that result in significant additional marketplace value. Those attributes may be intrinsic, such as flavor and mouthfeel, or extrinsic, such as provenance, producer information and production practices. [4] What is especially important about this definition is its recognition that different people and different markets may value different characteristics. Specialty therefore becomes less about finding a single universal hierarchy of coffees and more about understanding how distinctive attributes become meaningful within particular contexts.

The Same Coffee Has Different Value At Different Points In The Chain

Imagine one coffee moving from production to consumption. For the producer, value may begin with questions that have very little to do with the final consumer’s experience. Does the cultivar produce enough coffee to justify planting it? Is it sufficiently resistant to disease? How much labor does selective harvesting require? What are the risks associated with a particular fermentation or drying method? Can the resulting coffee command a price high enough to compensate for those decisions? From that perspective, yield, agronomic risk, labor requirements and market access are all part of value.

A green buyer approaches the same coffee from another position. The cup profile matters, but so do physical condition, available volume, reliability, logistics, timing, traceability and whether the coffee fits the needs of a particular customer or portfolio. When the coffee reaches a roaster, another layer appears. The sensory potential remains important, but now roast behavior, stability, green-coffee age, moisture, density, expected roast loss, product positioning and commercial viability become relevant as well.

The café sees yet another coffee. It may ask whether the coffee is easy to calibrate, whether it remains stable throughout service, whether staff can reproduce it consistently, whether it works as espresso or with milk, and whether customers actually reorder it. By the time the coffee reaches the consumer, the criteria may change again. Flavor, price, convenience, familiarity, provenance, ethics, novelty, prestige, ritual and personal preference can all influence the final judgment.

Nothing about this means that the coffee’s physical and sensory characteristics are irrelevant. It means that the same characteristics do not carry the same weight for every person involved. The coffee remains the same lot, but its value is continually interpreted according to the needs and priorities of whoever is evaluating it.

Why A High Score Cannot Explain Value By Itself

For many years specialty coffee depended heavily on scores as shorthand for quality and, indirectly, for value. Scores remain useful because they give professionals a common language for comparing coffee. The problem begins when we treat the score as though it were a universal conversion table between sensory quality and economic worth.

An 88-point coffee is not necessarily more valuable to every buyer than an 84-point coffee. Imagine an extremely floral, high-acidity, low-volume coffee with a distinctive sensory profile. It may be enormously valuable to a micro-roaster specializing in rare coffees, to a competitor preparing for a championship, or to customers actively seeking unusual sensory experiences. Put exactly the same coffee into a high-volume restaurant where most customers order cappuccinos and expect chocolate, sweetness, body and familiarity, and the calculation changes. The coffee has not lost its intrinsic quality, but its relevance to that specific business may be much lower.

Conversely, a balanced coffee that calibrates easily, remains stable throughout service, performs beautifully with milk and generates repeat purchases may have enormous value to that restaurant even if nobody would use it in a competition or pay an auction price for it. The difference is not that one coffee is objectively “good” and the other “bad.” The difference is that quality contributes to value without completely determining it.

This is one of the reasons the distinction between descriptive and affective assessment in CVA is so important. [3] Two experienced tasters can agree that a coffee has jasmine, citrus acidity and a tea-like mouthfeel and still disagree about how much they like those characteristics. Description and preference are related, but they are not identical. Once we understand that, it becomes easier to understand why a score can provide useful information without functioning as the final answer to the question of value.

Culture, Memory And Experience Participate In Value

Sensory perception does not happen outside culture. We taste with a brain that already contains memories, language, expectations and prior experiences. A person who grew up with panela, guava, tamarind or passion fruit may recognize and interpret certain sensory cues differently from someone whose reference vocabulary was built around black currant, elderflower, stone fruit or cardamom. Training can improve our ability to discriminate and communicate sensations, but it does not erase the sensory history we bring with us.

This matters because those differences influence not only how we describe coffee but also what we prefer. A flavor profile that appears exotic in one market may feel completely familiar in another. A coffee characterized by intense fermentation may be fascinating to one consumer and unpleasant to another. High acidity may signal brightness and complexity to one person while another interprets the same sensation as sharpness. Chocolate and nut characteristics may be dismissed as ordinary within some parts of specialty coffee even though they are precisely what another consumer considers comforting and desirable.

The value of a sensory attribute is therefore partly contextual. Floral is not universally superior to chocolate, just as higher acidity is not inherently more sophisticated than lower acidity. The attribute becomes valuable when it meets a person or market that recognizes and desires it. This is one of the reasons value cannot be separated from culture, memory and experience.

The environment in which coffee is consumed adds another layer. The same roasted coffee can be prepared twice and create very different experiences. One cup may be served anonymously in a paper cup to someone rushing through an airport, while another is prepared carefully in a café where the customer learns who produced it, how it was processed and why a particular recipe was chosen. The chemical composition of those beverages may be very similar, but their experiential value can be completely different because expectation, attention, service, setting and information influence how humans interpret what they consume.

This does not mean storytelling can manufacture sensory quality. A beautiful producer story cannot transform a defective coffee into an excellent one, and an expensive ceramic cup cannot create traceability that does not exist. What communication can do is make existing attributes visible. Storytelling can reveal value; it should not be used to invent it.

Economic Value Is Unavoidable, But Price Still Does Not Tell The Whole Story

It is easy to become philosophical about value and forget that coffee is also an economic system. Producers need income, workers need wages, exporters and importers need viable margins, roasters have operating expenses and cafés have rent, equipment and employees. Economic value is therefore not a secondary consideration. Without it, the chain does not function.

But economic value and final retail price are still not the same thing. A coffee can be underpriced at origin relative to the labor, risk and agricultural investment required to produce it while simultaneously appearing expensive to a consumer whose income makes a seven-dollar cup difficult to justify. Those two statements are not contradictory; they describe two different positions within the same value chain.

This is also why saying that consumers simply need to “pay more for coffee” is insufficient. A higher retail price does not tell us who captured the additional money or whether the producer received a meaningfully larger share. The presence of a higher price proves that the transaction became more expensive. It does not by itself demonstrate that value was distributed more equitably throughout the chain.

The SCA has explored this complexity through the idea of multiple “value worlds,” acknowledging that the worth of coffee can involve material, economic, social and emotional dimensions simultaneously. [5] That perspective is useful because it prevents us from looking for one variable that explains the entire system.

Rarity Creates Scarcity, But Scarcity Needs Desire Before It Becomes Value

Specialty coffee has become increasingly fascinated with rarity. We celebrate limited lots, rare cultivars, experimental fermentations, auction coffees and exclusive releases. Many of these coffees legitimately cost more because limited supply, greater production risk, additional labor and unusual sensory quality can all influence price. The mistake is assuming that rarity itself creates value.

If I possess the only purple spoon of a particular shape ever manufactured, I certainly own something rare. That does not mean anyone wants it. Scarcity becomes economically meaningful when it intersects with desire.

The same applies to coffee. A rare cultivar can carry extraordinary value when buyers care about the cultivar, when its sensory characteristics are desired, when its provenance has meaning, or when limited availability creates prestige or competition among buyers. If nobody values those attributes, rarity remains an interesting fact rather than a guarantee of value.

This distinction also helps explain why expensive coffees sometimes fail to resonate with consumers. The price may accurately reflect scarcity, production cost or auction demand, while the consumer still finds another coffee more pleasurable. There is nothing inconsistent about that response. The consumer is evaluating a different dimension of value.

Everyday Coffee Can Carry Enormous Value

Specialty coffee is particularly good at celebrating the exceptional, but we sometimes underestimate how much value comes from familiarity, usefulness and reliability. A coffee does not need to be extraordinary in a competition sense to become important to someone.

A customer may buy the same coffee every week because it is sweet, familiar, forgiving to brew and consistently enjoyable. A café may depend on a blend because it allows staff to create a recognizable experience throughout the year despite the unavoidable agricultural variation of its components. A roaster may value a coffee because it fills a specific position in a portfolio more effectively than a rarer and more expensive alternative.

These examples remind us that the value continuum is not a moral hierarchy. Novelty can create value, but so can familiarity. Exclusivity can create value, but so can accessibility. Complexity may be desirable, but so may straightforward sweetness and balance. The most valuable coffee is not necessarily the coffee with the greatest number of unusual attributes. It may simply be the coffee that best fulfills the purpose for which someone purchased it.

Education Should Reveal Value, Not Dictate Preference

Another assumption common in specialty coffee is that consumers would automatically prefer the coffees professionals consider superior if only they were sufficiently educated. Education certainly changes perception. Learning what a cultivar is, how processing works, why selective harvesting is costly or how specific sensory characteristics are recognized can give someone far more information with which to interpret a coffee.

But education does not create an obligation to prefer what the educator prefers.

A consumer can fully understand why a Gesha is rare, why its production is expensive and why professionals consider its jasmine-like profile extraordinary, and still choose a different coffee because they enjoy it more. That is not necessarily a failure of education. It is an expression of affective value.

This is another reason the CVA distinction between descriptive and affective evaluation matters. [3] Education can improve our ability to identify what is present, understand where it came from and appreciate the work behind it. Preference remains another question. The purpose of education should be to expand the consumer’s ability to recognize and interpret value, not to prescribe what that consumer is required to value.

Value Changes Because People And Markets Change

Value is also dynamic. A cultivar can move from relative obscurity to extraordinary demand. A processing method can shift from being treated as undesirable to becoming fashionable. An origin can acquire prestige. Environmental certifications can become more important as market priorities change. Sensory profiles that once seemed unusual can eventually become familiar.

Individual value systems change as well. Experience alters our frame of reference. The coffee I considered extraordinary ten years ago may not be the coffee that interests me today, not because the earlier coffee has somehow lost its physical qualities, but because I have changed as an evaluator. Markets do the same thing collectively.

This is why it is useful to distinguish between the attributes of the coffee and the importance assigned to those attributes. A cultivar, processing method, sensory characteristic or provenance exists whether or not the market currently values it highly. What changes is the relationship between the attribute and the people evaluating it. The SCA’s current definition of specialty coffee recognizes this explicitly by acknowledging that different people and markets may value different characteristics. [4]

Value Is Created, Preserved, Communicated And Sometimes Destroyed

Looking at the coffee chain as a sequence of value creation is useful, but even that description needs refinement because value is not simply added in a straight line. At each stage, people can create additional value, preserve value that already exists, communicate value to someone who could not previously see it, or destroy value that earlier stages had worked to produce.

A producer can create enormous agricultural and post-harvest potential, and poor storage can damage it before export. An importer can preserve the coffee beautifully, and a poor roast can obscure much of its sensory potential. A skilled roaster can develop an excellent coffee, and poor preparation can compromise the beverage. Finally, an extraordinary cup can arrive in front of a consumer who simply does not enjoy that profile.

That final preference does not erase the agricultural work, the physical quality or the technical skill that came before it. It does, however, demonstrate that value is not completed solely by production. An attribute must eventually become meaningful to someone.

For that reason, I prefer to think of coffee value as something co-created and continually interpreted throughout the chain rather than as a fixed quantity accumulated inside the bean. The producer, buyer, roaster, café and consumer do not merely pass value forward; each encounters the coffee through a different set of priorities and can change the way its attributes are preserved, understood and rewarded.

So What Are We Really Paying For?

When we pay more for specialty coffee, the price may reflect many different things at once: agricultural expertise, selective harvesting, processing, sorting, quality control, logistics, lower production yields, traceability, producer reputation, environmental practices, rarity, roasting skill, preparation, service or access to knowledge. It may also reflect branding, convenience, location, exclusivity or status. Some of those forms of value are intrinsic to the physical product, some are sensory, some informational, some economic and some experiential.

This is why neither a high price nor a low price can tell us whether something represents good value. A very expensive coffee can provide little value to someone who does not care about the attributes responsible for its price. A modestly priced coffee can provide enormous value if it consistently delivers exactly the experience that person wants. Conversely, inexpensive coffee is not necessarily good value when low price has been achieved by sacrificing quality, labor conditions, environmental responsibility or other attributes the buyer considers important.

The relevant question is therefore not simply whether a coffee is “worth” thirty, fifty or one hundred dollars. We need to understand what created that price, which attributes are being offered, who values those attributes, and whether what is received justifies what is being given up.

Specialty coffee has spent decades becoming increasingly sophisticated at identifying difference. We distinguish origins, cultivars, processes, physical characteristics, sensory attributes and quality levels with extraordinary precision. Perhaps the next step is becoming equally precise about why those differences matter, who they matter to, and how they become economic and personal value.

A score can tell us something important about an evaluation of quality. A price tells us the monetary terms of an exchange. Neither one can completely explain value because value exists in the relationship between the coffee, the people who created and transformed it, the market in which it appears and the person who ultimately experiences it.

That is why the same coffee can carry different value in Miami, Venezuela, Tokyo or the community where it was produced. It is why an everyday blend can become indispensable to one customer while an expensive auction coffee can be irrelevant to another. And it is why asking whether a coffee is objectively worth a particular price will always give us an incomplete answer.

Price tells us what the transaction costs. Value explains why somebody might decide that the transaction is worth making.

Thank you for reading me and please always remember....

"Because behind each cup of coffee there is much more than roasted beans."

Written by María Esther Thome-López

SCA Sustainable Coffee Diploma Recipient

SCA Coffee Sustainability Program Trainer

References

[1] Zeithaml, V. A. (1988). Consumer Perceptions of Price, Quality, and Value: A Means-End Model and Synthesis of Evidence. Journal of Marketing, 52(3), 2–22. DOI: 10.1177/002224298805200302.

[2] Holbrook, M. B. (Ed.). (1999). Consumer Value: A Framework for Analysis and Research. Routledge.

[3] Specialty Coffee Association. Coffee Value Assessment. Physical, Descriptive, Affective and Extrinsic Assessments.

[4] Specialty Coffee Association. What Is Specialty Coffee? Current SCA definition recognizing distinctive intrinsic and extrinsic attributes and their relationship to marketplace value.

[5] Specialty Coffee Association. From Value to Values: Determining the Worth of Coffee. Discussion of multiple value systems or “value worlds” operating within coffee.