Most coffee grown in the world never gets close to specialty grade. Industry estimates commonly put the figure at around 10–15% of global production — some sources cite numbers as low as 3%, depending on the year, region, and methodology used. However you slice it, the takeaway is the same: the majority of coffee grown worldwide is commodity-grade at best, and specialty is the exception, not the norm.
That's a strange thing to sit with, given how much coffee is grown globally every year. So what actually happens between the farm and the cup that knocks out 85% or more of the world's coffee before it ever reaches specialty grade? It comes down to a series of points where quality can be lost—and any single failure at any one of them is often enough to disqualify a lot entirely.
Point of Failure #1: Geography and Climate
Specialty-grade arabica generally needs to grow at higher elevation — roughly 1,200 to 2,200 meters — where cooler temperatures slow the ripening of the coffee cherry. That slower ripening lets the bean develop more sugar and more complex flavor compounds before harvest. Coffee grown at lower elevations, in hotter climates, or in less suitable soil ripens faster and tends to produce a flatter, simpler cup—through no fault of the farmer, just geography.
This alone removes a huge share of global coffee-growing regions from specialty contention before a single cherry is even picked.
Point of Failure #2: Variety
Not all coffee plants are capable of producing specialty-level flavor, even in ideal conditions. Some varietals are bred and selected primarily for disease resistance or high yield per hectare—valuable traits for a farmer's livelihood, but not traits correlated with cup quality. A farm growing a high-yield varietal in a mediocre microclimate is effectively capped below specialty grade regardless of how carefully everything downstream is handled.
Point of Failure #3: Harvesting
This is one of the biggest and most avoidable-in-theory, hardest-in-practice hurdles. Coffee cherries on the same tree—sometimes the same branch — ripen at different times. Specialty-grade harvests require hand-picking only the fully ripe cherries, often across multiple passes through the same trees over several weeks.
Lower-grade coffee is frequently harvested by machine, stripping entire branches at once, which pulls unripe, ripe, and overripe cherries together in a single pass. Unripe cherries in particular produce "quaker" beans—underdeveloped beans that don't roast or taste correctly—which count against a lot during grading. Selective hand-picking is dramatically more labor-intensive and expensive, which is exactly why it's not the default approach for most of the world's coffee production.
Point of Failure #4: Processing
Once picked, cherries have to be processed to remove the fruit and get to the green bean inside—typically via washed (wet), natural (dry), or honey processing. Each method requires precision: consistent fermentation times, clean water, and controlled conditions. Processing errors—over-fermentation, contamination, inconsistent timing—introduce defects (sour beans, moldy beans, off-flavors) that can drop a lot's grade regardless of how good the underlying cherries were.
Point of Failure #5: Drying and Moisture Control
After processing, beans have to be dried to a specific moisture range, generally cited around 9–13%, and held there consistently through storage and transport. Dry too fast or unevenly and the bean can crack or develop defects. Stay too moist for too long and the coffee risks mold or fermentation issues during storage. This step is easy to get wrong at scale, especially in regions without reliable drying infrastructure.
Point of Failure #6: The Grading Inspection Itself
Even a lot that survives every step above still has to pass physical inspection and cupping. Graders count defects in a standardized sample — a single serious ("primary") defect like a black bean, a sour bean, or foreign matter can be enough to disqualify a lot from specialty grade outright, regardless of how the rest of the sample looks. Then the surviving lot still has to score 80 or above out of 100 in a blind cupping evaluation by certified tasters. A coffee that's physically clean but simply doesn't taste distinctive enough still fails to make specialty grade.
Where the Other 85–90% Goes
Coffee that doesn't clear the specialty bar isn't discarded—it moves into lower grades (premium, exchange/standard, below standard, or off-grade) and gets sold largely as an undifferentiated commodity, often blended across multiple farms and even multiple countries to create a consistent, generic product. This is the coffee traded in bulk on commodity exchanges, priced by the market rather than by distinctive quality, and it's the raw material behind most supermarket-shelf coffee—including, historically, the vast majority of mass-market instant coffee, which has traditionally been made from whatever lots were cheapest rather than whatever tasted best.
Why This Matters When You're Choosing Instant Coffee
Because specialty grade is genuinely rare and expensive to produce, sourcing it for a product as inexpensive-feeling as instant coffee is a deliberate, costly choice—not a default. When a brand sources specialty-grade beans for an instant product, it means paying premium prices for a small slice of global supply and then processing it carefully enough (freeze-drying, not high-heat spray-drying) to preserve what made it specialty in the first place. That combination is the difference between bitter instant coffee that tastes like the bottom of the barrel and instant coffee that tastes great...like what it actually is: a top-quality graded, distinctive coffee that just happens to also dissolve in water. And that's what's in your packet of Forth & Further Brand Coffee.