What are the SCAA and HCCI Roast Coffee Standards?

Color is often used as an indication of quality and freshness for coffee products. This attribute is evaluated for the commercial classification of coffee based on its roast quality. Developing a coffee roast color range is an important part of the manufacturing process for monitoring roast quality.

For now, there are mainly two standards to judge the coffee color. One is SCAA and the other is HCCI.

What is SCAA? How they judge the coffee color?

The SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association of America) has produced a series of eight visual color standards for roast classification of ground.

Visual SCAA Roast Coffee Color Standards from “very light” to “very dark”.

SCAA divides coffee roasting into 8 levels. The higher the color value, the lighter the roasting degree. From light to dark, they are SCAA 95/ Agtron 95, SCAA 85/ Agtron 85, SCAA 75/ Agtron 75, SCAA 65/ Agtron 65, SCAA 55/ Agtron 55, SCAA 45/ Agtron 45, SCAA 35/ Agtron 35 & SCAA 25/ Agtron 25.

What is HCCI? How they judge the coffee color?

HCCI is HunterLab Coffee Color Index measures the reflectance of ground coffee products at 640 nm, which is optimal for defining the degree of roast.

HCCI works best for measuring during the roasting process, taking the coffee product to a consistent end point.

HCCI = [HCCI_slope * R%(640 nm)] + HCCI_offset

where default coefficients for HCCI_slope = 1.958 and HCCI_offset = – 3.32.

HCCI* comes with a user-adjustable bias and offset in each setup to allow display in agreement with existing instruments.

Measuring coffee color by device is more accurate than the visual method. ZHIYI-177C coffee color spectrophotometer is good choice to measure the color of coffee. It can show both HCCI and SCAA in one device. Any future inquiry, you are welcome to contact us.