An identity card to guarantee the origin and quality of one of the most consumed products in the world, coffee. This is what the collaboration between ENEA, the company PNAT (a spin-off of the University of Florence), the Accademia del Caffè Espresso (La Marzocco) and coffee guarantors from eight countries in Central and South America envisages. The goal is to achieve traceability of high-quality coffee (specialty coffee) and to help improve the livelihoods of the small farmers on whom these excellent products often depend. "This is a unique initiative because it aims to deepen the knowledge of coffee and investigate the possibility of scientific bases that measure the quality and characteristics of a cup of coffee, involving as many as eight producing countries worldwide," comments Gianfranco Diretto, head of the ENEA Green Biotechnology Laboratory. "We want to arrive at barista training on the model of sommeliers to offer consumers a 'journey' through different types of coffee, including providing for differentiated payment based on quality, traceability and sustainability," he adds. "Through the use of state-of-the-art biochemical analysis techniques, we identified the chemicals in 420 different coffee samples belonging to more than 30 Arabica varieties, while a bioinformatics approach allowed us to highlight that the samples differed significantly based on the country of cultivation," explains Alessia Fiore, project manager for ENEA and coordinator of the working group composed of colleagues Gianfranco Diretto and Sarah Frusciante. "The geographic origin of coffee, determines its molecular composition, as the soil and climate characteristics of each region are decisive and peculiar for different coffees and directly responsible for the sensory evaluations of the beverage, such as bitterness, acidity, body and sweetness," stresses ENEA researcher Sarah Frusciante.