Artificial Intelligence in your Coffee? Sure.

AI Is developing at an uncontrollable rate, probably due to its engineers drinking coffee. And they’ll be in for a treat when their own creations come right back to benefit them in a new way. AI is brewing up a cup of technological change all across agriculture and biotechnology, and I’m here to show you how.

Coffee plantations like these are the livelihoods for thousands of people and keep the world turning.

The coffee production industry is undergoing a phase, with the help of AI, which is streamlining operations and improving efficiency. A notable area where AI is making an impact is precision agriculture. By integrating AI powered devices into the production cycle, farmers, factory workers, and even shippers can now monitor their product with great detail in real time. In the broadest words, these intelligent devices gather important data enabling workers to optimize each step of the supply chain.

But to understand this process better, we should go over the exact process of how your hot-brown is actually produced. Here’s a rough guide:

1. After a coffee tree is planted, it generally takes about 3–4 years for it to start bearing coffee cherries.
2. The cherries are processed to prevent mold and fermentation. This usually takes place nearby where the coffee cherries are harvested. This gives us what is known as parchment coffee.
3. Parchment coffee is then taken to a facility where it the parchment layer is removed. This is also where grading and sorting takes place before the unroasted beans are exported abroad.
4. Once in the hands of a pretentious hipster roaster, the beans are then roasted at high temperatures to give them their signature color and taste.
5. The beans are then ground, bagged, and sold to consumers. You can also buy whole-bean coffee for you to grind at home.

I’ll walk you through how each of these steps can be optimized with AI, as well as the potential ethical concerns at the end of it all.

Like many valuable crops, Coffee is a notoriously difficult crop to grow successfully. It’s a picky plant, only grow in between the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn, meaning growing it anywhere outside this “coffee belt” requires investment into expensive agricultural technologies. However, AI is assisting the growing process to make coffee easier on humans. AI-powered sensors and drones assist in collecting real-time data that is important to have to grow a good crop, enabling farmers to make informed decisions about irrigation, fertilization, pest control, and harvesting.

With prices for coffee being some of the lowest ever, investment in AI technologies around the coffee plantation could cut down on manual labor while preserving or even improving the level of quality in every tree. This use of precision agriculture.

When it’s time for these cherries to be processed in industrial facilities , I think it’s clear-cut for how AI can help that.

In the field of industrial processing in most areas, AI emerges as a transformative force, optimizing various stages of production. In the world of coffee AI-powered sorting and grading systems meticulously analyze coffee beans’ color, size, and shape, ensuring standardized and high-quality products. Quality control is enhanced as AI-driven sensors and algorithms monitor crucial parameters such as temperature and humidity during milling and processing.

This AI aid enforces uniform bean processing, which maintains the desired quality standards. AI can also aid in streamlining the coffee parchment removal and milling process, ensuring efficient and precise operations, which also helps minimize waste and environmental impact. As a conductor of efficiency and consistency, AI plays a crucial role in elevating the coffee supply chain, delivering a delightful and sustainable coffee experience through AI taste testers. Its new disruptive presence in the coffee industry revolutionizes the way coffee is processed, milled, and transported, culminating in a concoction of flavor and precision, cup after cup.

In the final stages of the process, AI’s traditional role in industry starts to become more recognizable. Coffee roasting is a generally simple process (dry then roast then cool), but easy to screw up in part due to the more fallible nature of humans. AI is already taking over HVAC and Industrial Heating Systems, and automation has already sped up coffee processing in the first place, so what makes this the exception? .

Using sensors, AI can be used to fine-tune spin rate and temperature control to produce a well-roasted batch, as well as detecting the “first crack”, which is important for determining where a batch is in terms of done-ness. While such investment in AI technologies might be expensive, its ability to improve efficiency and leave human workers to more delicate tasks like quality control and cupping.

Ethical Concerns

Alas, the part you’ve either been waiting for or dreading. AI is undoubtedly changing industrial capability for the better, but how is it effecting the actual workers that are behind each cup of coffee you drink?

There are three-quarters of a million smallholder farmers or more in Latin America alone, and they need our help. Despite the majority living in poverty and facing threats like climate change and diseases, they’re able to sustain the ever increasing demand for our favorite caffeinated beverage. And how these AI technologies are used is important to determining if they could either greatly benefit or destroy the jobs.

One one hand, some argue that AI’s role in automating the coffee production process could smother out smallholder farms and drive them out of business in areas where the majority of jobs are in coffee. These smallholder farmers may not be able to afford or access the same technologies larger farms can, and would also be more vulnerable to changes in how larger farms use technology to leverage production.

But if we start to use AI in an ethical and responsible way, could smallholder farmers benefit from AI and automation in the coffee production process? AI is slowly becoming more accessible to people everyday, allowing people to benefit from using even base-level AI tools. and as long as consumers continue to demand better treatment of smallholder farmers that keep our world turning, and AI continues to become more accessible and more beneficial to the vast world of agriculture, things could start to turn for the better.

Some good further reading that I used for this article can be found here, here, here, and here.