“Coffee Quality” by Michael Sivetz

Coffee awareness has a lot to do with knowing the corporate coffee landscape and its history, and so to help complete that history and in memory of a true “coffee great” here is a collection of select pages from my own personal copy of “Coffee Quality” (1987) by the legendary coffee whistleblower, Michael Sivetz:

Michael Sivetz is known as the original “coffee expert”. As a chemical engineer, he published what is referred to as the “Coffee Bible” (called “Coffee & Technology” 1979) in which he was the first to break down the molecular composition of the coffee bean; roasted and green.

Yet you won’t find his name in many coffee histories, (save for the few companies that pay tribute to him for inventing fluid bed roasting technology, like this one) because he became a whistleblower after that. You see, he worked for some of the largest and now oldest coffee companies in the world during the early coffee commodity boom (1950s-60s), including Folgers, General Foods, and Kraft (then R&D).

Being and early insider, he became wise to some exploitative practices in coffee and refused to keep his mouth shut. Openly voicing to his colleagues his disapproval of certain of their practices, which he argued masked real coffee quality from the consumer and kept farmers in a cycle of poverty.

He was starting to have regrets about the work he did for the big corporations, much like the inventor of the pod machine eventually came out to publicly admit that he regretted his invention due to the environmental catastrophe that pods created.

Over time Sivetz became such a hassle for his profit-driven colleagues that eventually the industry stopped employing him to consult them. He was swept under the rug and some even tried to discredit him and make him out to be an eccentric.

The isolation caused Sivetz to self-publish the book “Coffee Quality” in which he “spilled the beans” on everything he knew and disapproved of.

“Coffee Quality” (1987) is arguably the most controversial coffee book ever written because it provides an insider, whistleblower perspective from the early days of coffee conglomeration. It is a primary source showing how early corporate greed created some of the conditions that led to the intensified social and environmental problems we have in coffee today.

For a more detailed history of Michael Sivetz, see this article by Merchants of Green Coffee.