The annual Specialty Coffee Association of America Event takes place this weekend in Atlanta, Georgia, bringing with it a spate of new product launches and brand revamps. We’ll be reporting on several over the next few days, but were given an advance look at the launch of a new QC Suite from Cropster.
Headquartered in Austria, Cropster’s stated goal is to “become an institutionalized hub for roasters and processors” around the world, facilitating communication across the supply chain and fostering a wider traceability for coffee’s journey from source to roast. The brand’s popular Cropster Hub is a worldwide network for green coffee buyers and sellers, while their Roast program is to coffee roasting what ProTools is to audio engineering, allowing users a streamlined and simplified way to track roast curves, a kind of heartbeat EKG chart for how a given coffee is roasted, where minute differences in temperature and time can yield a dramatic effect.
The result is increased control throughout the roasting process for some of your favorite roasters, and a better final product for consumers to enjoy. The casual Sprudge reader and coffee consumer may never know its effects, but for the roasting professionals that use Cropster swear by it. This behind-the-scenes integration of information technology into the coffee roasting process may not make for sexy mainstream headlines, but the control it affords is one of the many reasons why coffee today has never been more delicious.
Cropster’s new QC suite is launching this weekend to the specialty coffee industry gathered in Atlanta, offering “the first complete picture of coffee quality from green buying and selling through roast profiling to ensure roast consistency,” as per a press release provided to Sprudge by Cropster. The new suite offers increased reporting capabilities, as well as the ability to better integrate cupping (flavor evaluation) data into a more complete picture of a coffee’s development. Trend tracking and increased comparative analysis are also part of this update, all of which was built by Cropster’s in-house software and front end development team.
The Austrian company are also debuting a new app as part of this QC suite, dubbed Cropster Cup, allowing for evaluation scores to be captured on the go, and organizing the information within Cropster’s wider suite of services. “The new tools make your coffee data easily accessible and close the quality control loop,” Cropster CEO Andreas Idl tells Sprudge. This goal of a “closed loop” is a kind of holy grail for how information technology can intertwine a feedback loop across a single platform, and should be familiar to anyone who uses Apple products.
Industry professionals reading Sprudge can learn more in-depth about these developments by visiting the news section of Cropster’s official website. But for the laymen out there, the casual readers who love coffee, it’s worth noting that these kinds of tech developments in the coffee world play a huge role in the tasty mug you enjoy each day. Roasting was once a kind of dark art, hidden in the back room, shrouded in secrecy. As information sharing and improved technical integration draw roasting our of the shadows, it’s our belief here at Sprudge that coffee all around the world tastes better as a result.
Jordan Michelman is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge.com. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge.
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