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Welcome to The Drip (formerly Water in Food), where we keep your mind hydrated with some science, music, and a mantra. I'm your host, Zachary Cartwright, lead food scientist at AQUALAB by Addium
Hosted by Zachary Cartwright, Ph.D.
Lead FOOD Scientist at AQUALAB
https://www.aqualab.com/
WIF Ep 37 Cafe Imports
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[00:00:00] Zachary Cartwright: ​
[00:00:05] Zachary Cartwright: I'm Zachary Cartwright. This is Water In Food. Today, my guest is Ian Frehem at Cafe Imports, where he works as the Director of Sensory Analysis. In addition to working in the quality control lab and processing hundreds of thousands of tastebud signals using his 7th, 9th, and 10th cranial nerves, Ian can also be found preparing roasting and cataloging green coffee.
[00:00:26] Zachary Cartwright: Samples. In this episode. Ian discusses his long term [00:00:30] observational study on water activity and specialty green coffee as well as some new updates and insights. Since completing the study in 2019. Let's hear what Ian has to say on this episode of Water In Food. Ian. I recently came across your long term observational study on water activity and I thought you'd be a great guest for this show and I was just wondering where did your passion?
[00:00:51] Zachary Cartwright: Where coffee come from.
[00:00:54] Ian Fretheim: You know, my passion for coffee really, I wouldn't even call it necessarily a [00:01:00] passion. It's more of like, I was prepped maybe by some teachers and some of the study that I. done as a, call it as a youngster in Buddhism, where I was really looking at details and quieting down and being an observer.
[00:01:15] Ian Fretheim: And as I got this entry level job at Cafe Imports I was fortunate enough to have some really Great instruction from the original people, you know, setting up CAFE Imports, and they kind of turned me on to where I could be applying all [00:01:30] this nearly useless training that I had done in a professional setting which was Really great.
[00:01:37] Ian Fretheim: And so that in turn kinda sparked my interest, and then it's just snowballed from there.
[00:01:44] Zachary Cartwright: And I see that you were ordained as a Buddhist priest and you just brought that up a little, but how did that experience, how did that help you prepare for your current role at Cafe Imports?
[00:01:54] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, that's right.
[00:01:54] Ian Fretheim: So, before coming to imports and as I, especially the first First half of my [00:02:00] career, I was barely heavily involved in Zen Buddhism. And before imports, I was actually very heavily involved in Zen Buddhism and am ordained as a priest. And the the specific school that I was trained in has a lot of liturgy and a lot of meditation and not a lot of instruction.
[00:02:18] Ian Fretheim: And so the expectation is at least in, in more Traditional and kind of rigorous settings that I've spent my time in. The expectation is that you just observe and kind of pick it up [00:02:30] and learn as you go. And a lot of what you're doing is, everything is choreographed. So it's really frustrating and inane and it's like, oh man.
[00:02:43] Ian Fretheim: Incense stick needs to be 90 degrees, not 87 degrees, and all these little details, and you just learn to start observing them and appreciating them. And you know, maybe the end goal is a little bit different than what you might do in a [00:03:00] sensory lab or in a sample room but the underlying training is details matter details matter, and details matter.
[00:03:08] Ian Fretheim: So, stepping into the sample room where... Typos is a problem. Dropping a reference number is a huge issue. You know, getting lazy about the difference between this coffee flavor and this coffee flavor has huge ramifications for, you know, the person that you're potentially buying that coffee from. So [00:03:30] the the crossover from Buddhist training into the sample room.
[00:03:33] Ian Fretheim: I mean, it's not essential, right? We've got some great people in our sensory program and I'm the only Buddhist one. But certainly there was some translation that was really helpful and kind of set me up for some success here.
[00:03:49] Zachary Cartwright: Yeah, I'm sure it was really helpful to learn to be able to kind of block.
[00:03:52] Zachary Cartwright: Other things out and really focus on the present and looking at what flavors or aromas you're getting. So that's really interesting that was [00:04:00] able to help you. And so now you're in charge of sensory analysis of Catholic imports, or what is your title?
[00:04:06] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, so my title is director of sensory analysis.
[00:04:09] Ian Fretheim: Cafe Imports is an importer. We have our main office here in Minneapolis, and then we've got satellite offices in Berlin, Melbourne, and San Jose in Costa Rica. And so. My job encompasses the sensory, the cupping that occurs in all of those, as well as the organization of the sample room.
[00:04:29] Ian Fretheim: So [00:04:30] sample reception making sure that systems are in place to maintain the integrity of the chain of custody, I guess would be the best phrase for that.
[00:04:39] Zachary Cartwright: And how many fresh samples are you going through every year?
[00:04:43] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, so, we will be looking at roughly 6, 000 fresh samples a year. You know, when you market beginning of the calendar year, end of the calendar year, you're straddling harvest seasons.
[00:04:55] Ian Fretheim: And so if one season pushes a little late and one comes a little bit early, you [00:05:00] could, we could see 7 to 8, 000 in a single calendar year. But roughly, I would say about 6, 000, you know, in a adjusted harvest year.
[00:05:11] Zachary Cartwright: And you're looking at all 6, 000 of those samples, you're looking at doing the sensory analysis and making notes on?
[00:05:18] Ian Fretheim: Yes. Yep. Everything gets run through physical analysis, which is water activity, color, shape, and size assessment, moisture content, density. Everything gets [00:05:30] sensory analysis, which is, through our cupping program, everything is, of course, roasted and then has a further physical analysis of the roasted coffee.
[00:05:39] Ian Fretheim: So it's a pretty intensive life cycle for a humble little coffee sample.
[00:05:44] Zachary Cartwright: And the sensory analysis is this with an internal panel that you work with? Or do you ever do any, like, consumer testing with a larger group of people?
[00:05:53] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, so this is we are, we're B2B, business to business, right?
[00:05:57] Ian Fretheim: So we're an importer, we're [00:06:00] selling to roasters. So we're not really working directly with, coffee drinkers of the world. So our sensory is all internal. It's descriptive. So I, I have to assume that people listening here will kind of have some understanding of the difference in sensory sensory science between descriptive analysis and call it effective or preference testing and really what fits for us largely is a more analytic or descriptive bent to To the sensory program.
[00:06:28] Zachary Cartwright: And besides going through all these [00:06:30] samples what else makes Cafe Imports stand out among other companies that are doing something similar?
[00:06:36] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, so, a lot of, I guess what would be our competitors are truly massive companies in, in, on this planet. And, you know, we are, for lack of a better term, we're kind of a mom and pop when it comes to importers and particular importers of our size and our volume.
[00:06:56] Ian Fretheim: We came in at a pretty neat time. So it was prior to [00:07:00] really anyone or very many people thinking about what's coffee, where did coffee come from? We came into the scene and that just wasn't there and we started. Importing someone's coffee, right? So that was one of the big things, like, oh, this isn't just commodity.
[00:07:15] Ian Fretheim: This isn't just a nice commodity. This is somebody's work product. And we're, we had, we did that at the right time. We got traction with that and That's, we've stayed true to that, you know, for this, all these decades, right? 30 years, 35 years later we've [00:07:30] stayed true to recognizing again and again, this is somebody's coffee.
[00:07:35] Ian Fretheim: This is somebody's hard work. And now as a company, we've got maybe 70, 75 employees, I think. And I would, I think we're also true to that internally. So we recognize that everyone in the company is doing hard work and Finding ways to, you know, really try to find ways to make sure that our hard work is kind of holding up our end of the bargain as we're trying to buy coffee from people and then also [00:08:00] then turn around and try to sell it to other people.
[00:08:03] Zachary Cartwright: So it sounds like a great place to work and to be. I noticed that you also have a certificate in sensory analysis or something UC Davis. So I was hoping you could talk about that experience. Did that happen after you became ordained or? Where your journey did that happen and how did that help you get to where you are now?
[00:08:23] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, so, I do. I have a a professional certificate in consumer and sensory science [00:08:30] from University of California Davis that happened after I was ordained. Excuse me. And that came about, I went to a weekend workshop that was hosted by someone from Davis, and she mentioned this program was starting up, and so I went back and basically watched for the, watched for it to come live when I could sign up, got myself involved, and since then, it has really gone a long way to [00:09:00] change how I approach things and how I understand things, you know, Prior to that, I was a bit of an autodidact with regard to sensory science and You know, just reading textbooks and self study with all that stuff and getting some direction, doing some coursework seeing how it's applied technically within the field, within context was really helpful.
[00:09:23] Ian Fretheim: In some ways, tempering my, you know, more hard line, it needs to be like this, it needs to be like that, kind of [00:09:30] views, opened up this idea like, oh, sensory scientists can be pretty pragmatic, actually, with regard to making sure the systems that they develop have applicability have adoption, right?
[00:09:42] Ian Fretheim: You could create a perfect sensory science testing environment, but if it. If no one's gonna adopt it, then it's not that perfect, right? You need to meet your client. In our case, our company is, we're our own client as I'm [00:10:00] administering the sensory program internally, but you need to figure out where your client is what the realities of their Business or sensory situation really are, and then it's your job, you know, as the sensory scientist or the sensory admin person to devise the best possible test given the realities of where this, where your client actually is.
[00:10:26] Ian Fretheim: Right. So everyone wants to have a descriptive panel [00:10:30] with 20 to 30 people and close end testing where you get to spend two weeks on the same 10 coffees or whatever. But it's just like, in our lab, we don't. We can't we can't spend that kind of time on the same coffees, you know, we have new coffees that come in every single day, and we need to figure out ways to cycle through those, but still actually pay attention to every single coffee that comes through.
[00:10:54] Ian Fretheim: And of course, in a company of whatever it is here, 75 people, we're [00:11:00] not quite at the level where we can allocate 20 or so of those positions just to tasting coffee every day.
[00:11:08] Zachary Cartwright: Since you're going through so many samples and you're doing this every day, every week, what things do you do to prevent fatigue?
[00:11:15] Zachary Cartwright: How do you stay at your sharpest and how do you know that you're being able to analyze these samples correctly without getting maybe too tired and doing too many?
[00:11:26] Ian Fretheim: Yeah it's a big challenge. And especially now is as both [00:11:30] myself and my lab manager we've been working together for 12 years now, 11 or 12 years now.
[00:11:37] Ian Fretheim: And when we started, we were doing far fewer samples. And now as we hire new people and onboard them into the cuffing lab, we really have to step back and remember. We've had, you know, over a decade of acclimation and kind of Organically building our ability to deal with this many samples and deal with this much caffeine and this much coffee[00:12:00] and it's like really dropping people into the deep end when they come into the lab.
[00:12:06] Ian Fretheim: So a big thing that we do that I've really been focused on as we've continued to scale and see more samples and also want to do a better job with. Say attending to those samples a big thing that I've been focused on is refining our test procedure, right? So there are, there's a big list of common sensory [00:12:30] errors and there's physiological ones and there's psychological ones.
[00:12:34] Ian Fretheim: And these are not like good copper, bad copper errors. These are more like the troubleshooting manual for being a human sensory tester. And so, if you're at the table, it's kind of already a little bit too late, right? For most of these sensory errors, you need to design them into your test protocol in a way that assumes that they're going to happen, and then controls for their impact when you're looking at what the [00:13:00] output of it.
[00:13:01] Ian Fretheim: Days or weeks or months or a year's cupping is going to be so, a lot of my focus has been there actually on refining the testing protocols that we're using to minimize and control for some of these more common errors, including things like simple palate fatigue. Right. They get more complex than that, but that's an easy one.
[00:13:21] Ian Fretheim: You get tired.
[00:13:25] Zachary Cartwright: And talking about, you know, setting up studies and protocols, you released a study in [00:13:30] 2019 that was a long term observational study on water activity and specialty green coffee. Where did the idea for this come from? Why did you want to investigate this further?
[00:13:41] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, I had some conversations with a couple of people who I, in coffee, that I really respected.
[00:13:47] Ian Fretheim: And had just done a little poking around and it became pretty clear, you know, and I guess we probably started this in 2014 or 15 is maybe when we started looking at the taking water activity measurements and really [00:14:00] digging in and, you know, at that point, obviously. If you looked at, I don't know, any other food industry that, sector that dealt with food safety they were using water activity, right?
[00:14:11] Ian Fretheim: Like, if you looked at anyone who had a any kind of process control in a system water activity was involved. And it, there's, this is not a unique situation for especially coffee where Like literally everyone else in the entire universe is doing something and we're kind of doing our own [00:14:30] thing and tell someone looks and says, Oh, well, look, we're using moisture content to do every to do something that everyone else is using water activity to do.
[00:14:38] Ian Fretheim: Maybe we should look into that. Maybe we should explore that. So that's really where that came from. It just came from looking around for a minute and realizing that we were kind of missing the boat. on water activity and misusing moisture content.
[00:14:55] Zachary Cartwright: And how did you go about collecting data?
[00:14:57] Zachary Cartwright: What equipment or technologies were you [00:15:00] using for that?
[00:15:01] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, so we got a we got a water activity meter. It's called a 4TE DUO. Really neat little piece of technology. Not not the fastest thing in the world. Alright, so you'd calibrate it, throw your sample in, and if you were lucky, you'd get it out in 5 minutes.
[00:15:18] Ian Fretheim: If you were less lucky... 10, 15, or 20 minutes later, you'd get your beeps and you'd get your sample. And even when we started, we were still doing 5, 000 [00:15:30] samples a year. And so, our entire workflow is set up for efficiency and this water activity meter especially the the DUO was a bit of a bottleneck.
[00:15:40] Ian Fretheim: So we kind of worked out a post processing phase where we would take all the water activity and we just had this. Sample queue that would grow and contract and expand as we had time to get stuff through. Over the years, we had interns maybe spending the summer with us and could guarantee they were going to get a good chunk of [00:16:00] time spent sitting at the desk and, Running samples through, recording them, you know, we keep a spreadsheet at the time, just take down the reference number, take down the water activity reading, double check the numbers, move on to the next one, over and over and over again.
[00:16:20] Zachary Cartwright: What was your sample preparation? Like, were you breaking open the samples at all, or are you just putting full samples in? What did that process look like?
[00:16:29] Ian Fretheim: [00:16:30] So, I'm not sure if I quite follow. I mean, we get, so we get sampled, is this record? Is this like a vision? Is there an actual visual?
[00:16:36] Zachary Cartwright: Yeah, there may be a visual to this, so you can show it on your screen if you'd like to.
[00:16:41] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, so we get a little sample that looks like this. If it were this full, this would be a great one. This is maybe just a little bit under a pound right there. Normally we'd get maybe 350 grams. The duo would take I don't know, 10 or 20 grams of green coffee.
[00:16:57] Ian Fretheim: So we just drop the beans in a little sample cup. [00:17:00] And put it in and seal it up and press the go button, basically.
[00:17:05] Zachary Cartwright: And the reason I'm asking that is you know, most readings shouldn't really take longer than five minutes. And some of that can, you can overcome it with the way you prep the sample. If you cut the interior so that the equilibrium happens faster.
[00:17:19] Zachary Cartwright: And so I was just a little surprised about the time that you read. But if you weren't... Cutting it open. This could cause it to go longer. And it also kind of depends on the cleaning protocol and those types of things. [00:17:30] So I was just curious about how those samples were going inside the chamber.
[00:17:33] Zachary Cartwright: What were some correlations that you found? What did you find from this study?
[00:17:38] Ian Fretheim: Yep. So, let's see. We found that within the product, Green Coffee well, we essentially created, recreated the isotherm, right? Water activity, moisture content. We found there was a relationship. We found that it was not perfect.
[00:17:56] Ian Fretheim: We found that it was, you know, mild. That was, we'd say, like. [00:18:00] Mildly predictive, you know, give or take. We found that How do I put this? We were, you know, we were hoping to find a silver bullet with water activity, right? Yeah, unrealistic, right? Similarly, when I was a kid, before I went snowshoeing for the first time, I had it in my mind that I was going to levitate three inches above the snow.
[00:18:20] Ian Fretheim: And then I realized that I was still like trampling through the snow. And it's like, I'm disappointed, but it was an unrealistic expectation.[00:18:30]
[00:18:32] Ian Fretheim: What happened was we realized that our initial expectation was unrealistic, but we were taking this data and we were finding that the correlation to moisture content was not perfect. And, of course, everyone was still using moisture content to do things that water activity was actually the direct control for.
[00:18:52] Ian Fretheim: You know, so we're talking about lipid oxidation, we're talking about mold, we're talking about... You know, storage, warehouse control, [00:19:00] that kind of stuff. And so, we decided to continue, keep going, and kind of pivoted our goal to really unpacking the relationship between the two. Measurements and seeing what else we could find within water activity.
[00:19:15] Ian Fretheim: So most of the stuff that we found within water activity, most of the correlations still matched up with moisture content, but with, I would say a lot, you know, a greater level of precision, right? And moisture content. Ultimately, you're going to [00:19:30] have to say, you're going to have to use a larger plus or minus with any statement that you want to make about it less so with water activity.
[00:19:36] Ian Fretheim: And so, now I kind of describe water activity as sort of a ground truth measurement, right? So if you're training an autonomous vehicle, then you've got cameras and ultrasonics and radars and lidars. Trying to measure everything. That's really great, but you need to have some crazy system, and I don't want to mischaracterize water activity, but you [00:20:00] need to have a, you need to have a robust highly tuned, accurate system that you can measure everything off of.
[00:20:08] Ian Fretheim: Right? So, that would be the ground truth. And in a lot of ways, we still take water activity on every sample that comes through even if we're no longer measuring. Rigorously pursuing new information from it. We're still measuring it and every time I get a question back from a customer of ours or a coffee supplier with regard to quality or [00:20:30] with regard to, I think this moisture content is too high or, What happened to this coffee?
[00:20:36] Ian Fretheim: Water activity is still probably the first thing I go into the spreadsheet and look for is, okay, well, what was the water activity when we first saw it? What happened to it a month later? You know, how did, how is, what's the story that unfolded with the water activity? Did it make sense what I'm hearing about the moisture content?
[00:20:54] Ian Fretheim: Right? So, sometimes someone will come and say, well, I think your moisture content meter is broken. [00:21:00] And I'll say, well, well, that's quite possible. I mean, moisture content meters are using formulas. They're using algorithms. They have different, they measure differently. Very few people are actually using the oven method.
[00:21:13] Ian Fretheim: I mean, we're not using the oven method to take moisture content, but then I'll go back and look. And because of having this history of water activity, Okay. And this understanding of the general correlation [00:21:30] it makes us very comfortable with regard to, Oh, our moisture content reading does make sense.
[00:21:34] Ian Fretheim: It is tracking not just with what we're observing in the coffee, but it's tracking with where we expect it to be with regard to what we've read this many times on the water activity set.
[00:21:47] Zachary Cartwright: Yeah, I think it's really interesting that you said, you know, you tried to correlate water activity and moisture content and you kind of got an isotherm, but it maybe wasn't as smooth as you were hoping.
[00:21:56] Zachary Cartwright: And I think some of that comes from the inherent variability and [00:22:00] whatever moisture content method you use. There are some newer isotherm technologies, like the dynamic dew point isotherm that uses a dew point measurements for the water activity, just like your 4TE Duo. But then it looks at weight change and uses a starting initial moisture content to calculate based on weight change back to moisture.
[00:22:23] Zachary Cartwright: And this can actually allow you to get a really smooth curve. And I have one later that I'll send to you because I think that [00:22:30] would be kind of helpful and insightful to you. A few things that stood out to me in your study. I noticed that you mentioned that there was a correlation between water activity and Maillard Browning reactions.
[00:22:41] Zachary Cartwright: And that... You know, higher water activities led to increased browning, and we see that in lots of other products as well, but I thought that was interesting. And then you also recommended some storage conditions for green coffee, and I just was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that.
[00:22:57] Zachary Cartwright: What are the storage conditions that you [00:23:00] recommend?
[00:23:01] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, so, let's see. Oh, we'll circle back maybe to the my art stuff, because that's kind of an interesting thing. And it's actually a question that I'm going to have, I have for you that I'd like to get, I'd like to get some clarification on but storage conditions, one of the things that was really fascinating to me that I didn't know coming in was the relationship between relative humidity and water activity number.
[00:23:23] Ian Fretheim: If I've understood this correctly, 60 percent relative humidity is 600 water activity.[00:23:30] So that, that was a great kind of aha, like, it's pretty simple, but until you know it, you don't. know it, you don't realize it. Right. And everyone, you know, you've got, how do you store coffee? Well, keep it dry, keep it cool.
[00:23:46] Ian Fretheim: Keep it clean. This is, none of that is new, but introducing introducing water activity measurement, understanding that water activity is dependent on or is tied to temperature. So your [00:24:00] measurements are, okay. Your carrying capacity, just like relative humidity, your carrying capacity is tied to temperature realizing that these things are all knit together and interconnected and are not just old rules of thumb are I think that was, I think that was a bit of a turning point or a bit of an insight for us with regard to storage.
[00:24:20] Ian Fretheim: So, with that being said, what we've measured in specialty coffee, Is that call it 0. [00:24:30] 6100 seems to be a critical level for specialty green coffee. Above that, we're going to start to see from an observational perspective, we're going to start to see all of the water activity controlled reactions really ramp up.
[00:24:44] Ian Fretheim: I don't think green coffee is particularly unique in that. In that regard below that, I think we start to see a little bit more, a little bit more stability and so while we're not going to try to store coffee in a 30 percent [00:25:00] humidity environment we're going to, we're definitely going to try to keep it down below 60 in, maybe in that 60 and 50 percent range with Sub 70 Fahrenheit temperatures.
[00:25:13] Ian Fretheim: A little twist that has been also of interest is that over the course of this study a technology or a bagging protocol called GrainPro came strongly online in the coffee world. It already existed, of course, but it went from being fairly common to being [00:25:30] pretty much, almost every lot is GrainPro ed at this point.
[00:25:34] Ian Fretheim: And, you know, GrainPro is a, just a big, Plastic bag, essentially, and it does a fantastic job of excluding that environmental moisture or humidity from interacting with the coffee. Now, there's some question about, you know, if you pack too wet of a coffee or to active of a coffee in a GrainPro bag, and then you subject it to temperature swings, because GrainPro will [00:26:00] not protect against temperature swings.
[00:26:01] Ian Fretheim: At that point then you might still have some stuff to look at with regard to coffee respiration, and then condensation inside the bag, and then adsorption and all kinds of neat stuff like that.
[00:26:17] Zachary Cartwright: I'd be really interested to know the water vapor transmission rate of those bags, because if we knew that we could actually investigate and run some simulations and under different conditions, understand if the water activity is going to shift [00:26:30] around or not, or the temperature, like you mentioned, you know, if this sits somewhere where the temperature is higher than the water activity is going to increase, but that's something that's actually really predictable and possibly we can look more into that.
[00:26:42] Zachary Cartwright: In the future, and I just wanted to add on. I think the aha moment that you have where, you know, the relative humidity is the water activity. A lot of people have this. You know, there are certain industries where we primarily talk in terms of relative humidity, especially in, like, pharmaceuticals, for [00:27:00] example, because it just makes better sense to them.
[00:27:02] Zachary Cartwright: That's what they're used to. But you're exactly right. Any food sample, whether it's coffee or something else, it has its own relative humidity. So when we put it. In a closed chamber, it creates a relative humidity in that space. And when it comes to storage, I think it's important to understand that the food sample wants to come to equilibrium with the surrounding environment.
[00:27:24] Zachary Cartwright: So if you set it at an environment that is 60 percent relative humidity, [00:27:30] even if the coffee sample is higher in water activity, if you give it enough time, it will slowly come to equilibrium and settle at 6. And so I think that's really important to your industry and lots of industries when we think about how to store things and what our target water activities are.
[00:27:48] Ian Fretheim: Can I ask you a question?
[00:27:50] Zachary Cartwright: Of course.
[00:27:51] Ian Fretheim: This has to do with this has to do with MIARD. So water activity is a controller of MIARD spoilage. So, [00:28:00] as I've understood that we're going to talk about room temperature or relatively room temperature browning reactions that are going to occur non enzymatically.
[00:28:08] Ian Fretheim: Via well, I, I don't know via what, but I know that this Maya art spoil spoilage is controlled by water activity. And in coffee, we roast coffee, and just like baking bread, or just like searing a steak we have non enzymatic maillard browning. I think a number of people, and I'm not sure if they're the ones, I don't think they're the ones who are correct, but [00:28:30] maybe they are, and maybe I'm going to learn something here.
[00:28:32] Ian Fretheim: I think a number of people have taken one to one the browning that occurs in cooking or roasting, and the browning that occurs in maillard spoilage as being the same. Thank you. I've thought that it is not the same just because of the kind of radical or violent amount of heat that is thrown at coffee or bread while baking or roasting, where, you know, in coffee, we've got, [00:29:00] you drop a coffee into the roaster at 12 percent moisture, 0.
[00:29:05] Ian Fretheim: 6, water activity. And the first phase is it dries out. And if you then take the coffee out of the roaster, you know, at the point where it's dry, it's not started in my yard, it's still green, but fairly green, it's like faded out. You take it out, let it cool, come to room temp, take another moisture and water activity reading, [00:29:30] there's not any moisture left, and there's not any water activity left.
[00:29:33] Ian Fretheim: And so it's hard for me to see how a coffee that starts green with a higher water activity is going to do anything differently in a roaster than a coffee that starts green with a slightly lower water activity, apart from requiring a little bit more energy to dry the moisture out of the coffee.
[00:29:54] Ian Fretheim: Right. I don't see a big difference with your starting water activity. I think that the browning that we're getting, especially from [00:30:00] the heat exposure, is really different than if we sit something out and allow those reactions to happen over time. Where water activity really comes into play with browning reactions is that Browning reaction rates are affected by the water activity level.
[00:30:14] Ian Fretheim: So if we go really low in water activity, there's not much water available to help constituents or different chemicals to come together and go through those browning reactions as we start to add water activity, usually up to about a 6 range. This is [00:30:30] really optimal. for my art reactions because now you're allowing some fluidity and some movements so that these things can react and brown.
[00:30:39] Ian Fretheim: But if we went even higher in water activity, then you start to dilute and this is when reactions slow down again. So a lot of reaction rates beyond just browning, you know, lipid oxidation or degradation of certain constituents. These are also affected by water activity, but browning especially has been really well defined, and it makes sense that you, [00:31:00] the observations that you made, but again, I think that the browning that we see from the heating versus just sitting there and spoilage or just sitting out there are going to be two different processes.
[00:31:11] Ian Fretheim: Yeah.
[00:31:11] Ian Fretheim: Okay. Thank you. Thanks for verifying. Thanks for verifying that. It's actually a strange thing to try to, you know, open up Google Scholar and try to keyword papers to talk about this specific, very specific, different. You can read a lot about Myard spoilage and you can read a lot [00:31:30] about heat applied browning.
[00:31:31] Ian Fretheim: Yeah. But strangely challenging to find someone just flat out talking about both simultaneously. This is what one is, and this is what the other is. This is why they are or are not the same.
[00:31:48] Zachary Cartwright: And maybe if somebody listening to this happens to be doing a study or knows about more about this, we'd be happy to learn about it.
[00:31:56] Zachary Cartwright: So maybe this will result in a clear answer. [00:32:00] Since you finished that study, have you continued to do any research? Are there any new observations that you've come up with since you released that study?
[00:32:08] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, I mean, like I said, we have continued to take our water activity readings. We continue to reference them and use them.
[00:32:14] Ian Fretheim: Sort of as the, one of the first places that we go. We're not currently doing any direct study with regard to water activity or anything new. Great. It's one of the automatic kind of like included in the query. If you're going to run a, [00:32:30] you're going to run a ANOVA or something like that. It's like, well, we're just going to throw a water activity in as a variable because we have it and it is more direct than moisture content.
[00:32:39] Ian Fretheim: So it's kind of, I guess from us it's transitioned from like the shiny object to the sort of like a solid foundation or the baseline that we're just comfortable. Yeah. Standing on, right? So, but the reality is that transition is, I would [00:33:00] say, really powerful and really speaks highly of what we found the place of water activity to be, but it also kind of means that well, it's not the shiny object so much anymore.
[00:33:09] Ian Fretheim: And so, a lot of our, Active attention and active digging and research ends up going elsewhere.
[00:33:17] Zachary Cartwright: And where would you like to see more research when it comes to coffee? And it could be do with have to do with water activity or maybe something else. Where would you like to see more research emphasized?
[00:33:28] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, you know, there are a handful of [00:33:30] places. One of these which is somewhat related to, which is related to water activity is so. As mentioned in the in the paper and that study that I wrote we, in coffee in particular, have the shipment period, and I will say the dreaded shipment period.
[00:33:47] Ian Fretheim: So, we receive samples from suppliers coffee growers, coffee exporters, co ops, etc. And we, you know, Sample is, if we're lucky, it's this big. [00:34:00] And this could represent one full sized coffee bag, or it could represent a full container load. And we're gonna assess that sample, physically sensorially and we're gonna cross our fingers and hope that assessment has anything to do with the arrival.
[00:34:21] Ian Fretheim: And the arrival, of course, happens after the shipment period, which could be... You know, it could be a month. If it goes perfectly, more likely it's three months, [00:34:30] and it could be eight months, right? It could be, it would have been five months, but it got stuck in port on the exit for a month, and then it got stuck in port entering the country for a month, and then there was a strike, and eight months later, here it is.
[00:34:50] Ian Fretheim: And huge chunks of that time frame were spent, you know, cooking at sea level in, you know, in the bottom of a [00:35:00] container ship. Or sitting in the sun on the back of a train or a truck, you know, the shipment period is this, it's this big black box that transforms coffee, even in grain pro, even in reefer containers.
[00:35:14] Ian Fretheim: Scores change, of course. Sensory profiles change, of course. But moisture content can change over that time period. Density can change over that time period. Water activity changes over that time period. Or, it's not so much that it changes, it's just that the sample was not [00:35:30] truly, fully representative of the whole.
[00:35:33] Ian Fretheim: That differentiation is a big, that's a big challenge, right? That's the thing that we were initially, naively I would say, but initially hoping water activity would. Really give us greater insight into so anyone can solve that kind of like the packaging that we talked about earlier there.
[00:35:51] Zachary Cartwright: There are some simulations that you could do and kind of understand at least how water activity may be moving down it around at different parts of the shipment [00:36:00] process.
[00:36:00] Zachary Cartwright: And that may be helpful to you. I'll reach out again and maybe see if we can look at that further. What's next for you, Ian? What's the next year or maybe next five years look like for you at CAFE Imports?
[00:36:14] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, so all year this year and actually just starting a little bit prior to COVID, so end of 2019 or somewhere in 2019, I started working on what has been a very exciting project.[00:36:30]
[00:36:30] Ian Fretheim: Reaching back to the question about the sensory certificate from Davis started working on a update to our cupping protocol and our cupping form, which just this year we started using live internally in our cupping lab actually in our cupping labs globally, and have started being able to introduce at conventions and shows and out to the world.
[00:36:53] Ian Fretheim: And so, what we've done is taken a. Check all that apply format KATA [00:37:00] format. And we have so, a KATA format is essentially a list of descriptive terminology. It could be descriptive, it could be affective, it could be both. And the user is asked to taste, in our case, some coffee. And they look at this list, and they just check the things that apply.
[00:37:19] Ian Fretheim: So, taste the coffee, look at the list, it says chocolate, I agree. You check chocolate and you move on. If the list says lime and you don't agree, you just don't check it [00:37:30] and At the end of the day, you've got this list of things from people, and you see what matched up, and there's different ways you can analyze that.
[00:37:38] Ian Fretheim: Akata is a really fascinating approach because of its sort of hybrid nature. Because it is very easy to get into and utilize. But after a while, it was discovered that you could give Akata form, curate what's on it, and you could give Akata form to train sensory panels. And you could use it as [00:38:00] a proxy for a more rigorous descriptive analysis regimen.
[00:38:05] Ian Fretheim: And so suddenly that makes Kata a really interesting place to be where you have a very Low barrier of entry, very easy to pick up and learn, but you have a really long usage runway in terms of what you could extract from its use. And so, the problem with Kata is that it's confined to a [00:38:30] list. And so if you want to have, if you've ever read a coffee, if you've gone to the grocery store and picked up a coffee bag or gone to a shop and you've read the description, You know that in, in specialty coffee we get we get a little funny with our coffee descriptions.
[00:38:43] Ian Fretheim: We have a high level, a little extravagant, yes. We'll call it a high level of resolution. And if you want to think of any fancy coffee description and then extrapolate, okay, what would the list, what would the Kata list have to include to fairly include some of [00:39:00] this terminology? The list. would be massive.
[00:39:02] Ian Fretheim: The longer the list gets, the higher the resolution gets, the less usable the kata form becomes. The more you restrict the list the more usable the form becomes, but the less resolution you have. So what we've done is taken a flavor wheel, which is a tiered structure of sunburst chart, that has tiers and category, kind of like pie slices.
[00:39:27] Ian Fretheim: And we've structured it so that[00:39:30] you can take something like, just call it cooked blackberry. Now, cooked blackberry is a very complex compound term. It comprises a fruit category. It comprises sort of a qualifier, cooked. It comprises a type of cooked fruit, that's berry, and then a specific, that's blackberry.
[00:39:50] Ian Fretheim: So what we've done is we've tiered a flavor wheel to include Each of those building blocks and programmed it [00:40:00] into a tablet so that the user can, instead of having to scan a list and say, well, it's not just fruit, it's not cooked berry. It is, but it's more than cooked berry and then scan.
[00:40:11] Ian Fretheim: Where's cooked blackberry? There it is. Similar to transitioning from a spreadsheet to a database where you're going to eliminate all the redundant entries. This flavor wheel, because it's set up with building blocks, allows users to build out cooked blackberry, or cooked raspberry, or fresh citrus, or fresh orange[00:40:30] without having all of this terminology repeated every single time.
[00:40:34] Ian Fretheim: So, I'm getting, I'm excited about it. It's a really fun project for us. In any case, we've got this Kata form that is dynamic. It's structured on a flavor wheel. So, the flavor wheel contains I did this once, it's like six or seven pages, two columns, 12 point font, single spaced of terminology, right?
[00:40:56] Ian Fretheim: Like, there's a huge, there's way too much on there, but it [00:41:00] fits and it's all logically easy to find because you're building from big to little. And then the kicker here is that you know, you tap on something, you tap on fruit, and the wheel spins around, and the fruit category opens up, and everything else contracts, and you can see what you're doing, and you can easily find what you're looking for.
[00:41:19] Ian Fretheim: The kicker is on a normal Kata form, you circle or check the thing that you want to endorse, that, that's what it's called when you're going to enter or indicate something, you endorse it. On [00:41:30] ours you enter your thing, so fruit cooked, berry, blackberry, and then to endorse it, you indicate an intensity.
[00:41:38] Ian Fretheim: And by indicating an intensity that puts us back into the realm of it's soft, but puts us back into the realm of descriptive analysis as opposed to preference or effective assessment, right? So we're still focused on, okay, I'm tasting cooked blackberry and I'm tasting it at this intensity relative actually to a generic [00:42:00] reference coffee that we're using on every table.
[00:42:02] Ian Fretheim: So. This has been the project. We call this thing the Coffee Rose. It's a software product that we're working on. We've been using it internally. It's super fun to use and the output is great. It captures everything. I no longer have typos or dropped words or things that I just can't read when I'm looking at paper forms.
[00:42:26] Ian Fretheim: I have this complete capture of everything. The [00:42:30] scoring is programmed into it, right? So in coffee, we score coffee. We describe them with words, but we also give them scores. This is also a weird and interesting thing because a coffee score is an interpretation. And so for most coffee scoring protocols, so if you're reading a paper, anyone out listening to this, if you're reading a paper about a study done in coffee, and you get two methods and materials, and they say they use the.
[00:42:56] Ian Fretheim: I'm not gonna, I'm just, I'll say it like this. If they say that they use the [00:43:00] standard industry protocol or the legacy cupping protocol what's really important to know about that is that protocol is presented as if it were descriptive, but in fact it is effective. The questions are all set up around, do you think this is good or not?
[00:43:16] Ian Fretheim: If you look, yeah, so you look at a, you look at a publication, you look at methods and materials, it uses the traditional cupping format. The first thing you need to know is that is actually an effective test, not a descriptive test. So it's not measuring coffee, it's measuring the person's response.
[00:43:29] Ian Fretheim: [00:43:30] to the coffee. And that right at the baseline, it kind of, it throws a red flag. I actually made a parenthetical in the water activity paper which I didn't realize this in advance, it came up as I was working on the paper, was that actually the cupping output that most of us use or that, I mean, we've been using We, I built a quantitative descriptive analysis form in 2017 that we transitioned to, but prior to that the [00:44:00] legacy cupping protocols that most people are using are really not suitable for this type of analysis that we might want to do.
[00:44:08] Ian Fretheim: Right? We're gonna do a longitudinal study tracking quality degradation in coffee. The legacy protocols are not suitable. They're suitable for preference. You know, do people like this over time? Do people like this or that? That's fine, but in terms of actually talking about what's going on with the coffee those are no longer, they're not really applicable to that.
[00:44:29] Ian Fretheim: The [00:44:30] ROSE, I think, is applicable to that. We have, oh, this is what I lost my train of thought on. We have scoring built in to each of the things. If you think of a SUMBRS chart, There's all these descriptors on there, and each one is a button. Press the button, and you tell the row something, there's a value associated with that button.
[00:44:51] Ian Fretheim: What that means is that if I'm in a very good mood on Monday morning, and I'm tasting a coffee, and I taste juicy mango, [00:45:00] I'm gonna enter that, and it's gonna have the same value as on Thursday when I'm crabby. And I taste juicy mango. It's going to be the same. It's going to be the same. So when you tender a coffee sample to me now, suddenly as long as I can kind of like Zen myself up and be focused at on the task at hand and say, yep, juicy mango.
[00:45:24] Ian Fretheim: It's always going to be, it's always going to have the same value. There's no room for. interpretation. [00:45:30] There's no ask for me to do interpretation at the table, right? We're just describing what we're tasting and then the system itself does the interpretation after the fact. So there you go. That's the project.
[00:45:44] Ian Fretheim: That's the next year. I think that's the next five years building this thing out making it available to our customers and, you know, anyone who's interested in actually I think I think there's great potential for people to gain a lot from this and for certainly [00:46:00] for cupping programs to gain a lot from this.
[00:46:02] Ian Fretheim: We've built in a lot of a lot of the kind of nitty gritty, less sexy sensory protocols are built right into the workflow of the system.
[00:46:12] Zachary Cartwright: Yeah, it sounds really interesting and really helpful and user friendly. I'm more familiar with like the wine aroma wheel, but I think the way that you've set this up makes it really helpful for somebody who has to go through this.
[00:46:24] Zachary Cartwright: So I'd be really interested to see it in action. Kind of my last question. I generally [00:46:30] ask about any open positions at your company. I saw here that you recently filled several positions, but maybe I'll word it like this. If anybody is listening and they're really interested in sensory analysis, especially the sensory analysis of coffee, what do you recommend to them?
[00:46:46] Zachary Cartwright: What can they do to get better trained or prepare themselves for a career like yours?
[00:46:52] Ian Fretheim: Sure. Yeah. So, you know, you can certainly you can check out the sensory science program at [00:47:00] Davis. I will say that sensory science is just like water activity. It's not a, it's not a silver bullet. It's not a panacea.
[00:47:06] Ian Fretheim: If I think if sensory science had its way, it would kind of like it. Absorb specialty coffee in this Borg like, flavorless, dull, boring world where you're no longer going to have beautiful coffees. And so, you know, don't go whole hog there, but certainly a great avenue would be to explore sensory science as a discipline, as a standalone field.
[00:47:27] Ian Fretheim: And then within the coffee side [00:47:30] definitely keep your eye on our website, our socials, all of that. We are, I mean, Cafe Imports is, remains exciting and dynamic business. We have projects going on all the time, and we continue to grow and hire people, and do our best to make opportunities for people especially if you're interested in sensory and tasting coffee, and think that you have the, kind of the, get yourself in that headspace where you can just, Come into the back of the building every day and taste a [00:48:00] million coffees.
[00:48:00] Ian Fretheim: Yeah, keep your eye on all that stuff. And then, you know, you know, turn your brain on when you're tasting food, or drinking wine, or having a beer, or, you know, if you smell something, that is, that's sensory. You taste something that's sensory. It doesn't have to be a like a... Movie montage of training and whatever.
[00:48:23] Ian Fretheim: You know, it's just, you're always sensing, you're always tasting. It's really a question of turning your brain on while you're doing that. And even if you don't [00:48:30] come work for cafe Imports That with a little, like, directed study in, in the way that sensory scientists do things can take you a very long way and really prep you for what you might get to do anywhere.
[00:48:43] Zachary Cartwright: Well, Ian, I just want to say thank you. We really appreciate you coming on the show. Again, when I saw your study, I thought it was just a really unique approach to something that a lot of people in the industry seem really interested in. And I think this will be really insightful to our listeners. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
[00:48:59] Zachary Cartwright: We, we [00:49:00] really appreciate you.
[00:49:01] Ian Fretheim: Thanks. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Really fascinating to do the study and it's really gratifying that after a handful of years here, people are still finding it and reaching out to me. People still, you know, partners of ours, coffee producers of ours, still come up to me and say, Oh, I read the study.
[00:49:20] Ian Fretheim: Okay. I had no idea that's what I was doing when I did that. And so this is wonderful. And I appreciate having the opportunity to chat with you today. [00:49:30]
[00:49:31] Zachary Cartwright: Great. Thank you. And we'll see you again. I'm Zachary Cartwright. This is Water Food. Find this podcast on Apple iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.