Announcements     Rethinking Regions

2020-12-18 11:01

Rethinking Regions

Over the past few months, we have been planning for the future of greens data. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to have complete and accurate greens data in your library of greens. As a first step to that process, we have changed the way we think of coffee regions. Until now, the regions in our system were geo-political regions (states and provinces). It was a well defined and agreed upon way to locate the source of a green. Very few countries have disputed boundaries of a state or province. Unfortunately, while those regions might be accurate, they don’t provide a lot of value.

We are changing how we think about regions and have moved towards “growing regions”. This is how much of the coffee industry thinks about regions. This move has both positive and negative outcomes. The negative is largely around a fuzzy definition of what makes a region and what farms may or may not be in a specific region. Accuracy is the challenge in such a system.

However, the positives will generally outweigh the negatives in the long run. In the future we hope to be able to leverage the data to help you find greens that are similar to greens you have used in the past. As you are perfecting your blends, we know everyone will run out of a source green sooner or later. We expect this change will make it possible to find new greens that match the growing conditions and resulting roast profile to keep the consistency you want in your blends. In the future, we plan to build tools that will help you find similar greens.

The unfortunate outcome is that geo-political regions didn’t map well into growing regions. Rather than making a poor attempt at mapping with a high rate of mistakes, we have cleared the region data in your greens library. We don’t like that we had to clear this data. It is the cost of being an early adopter of new software. Because the old regions weren’t a good fit for greens, many people didn’t bother to setup regions in their greens library. For anyone who is troubled by this loss of their old regions, we have a backup and can provide you with a list of the old regions you had set, if you would like to map your greens to the new regions.

Our friends at Café Imports have a fantastic set of maps showing coffee growing regions. https://www.cafeimports.com/north-america/origins

You should see a new app version in the store in the coming days. Updated regions will be reflected in the new version. Regions will be blank in the app version you have today.

If you have thoughts on the future of better greens data, please share them in the comments.

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