The four processes described above are between forty and one hundred twenty years old. Since about 2020, under pressure from a specialty market that wants presentable decaf, a second wave is appearing. It has a common characteristic worth noting before going into detail: it moves the operation to origin. Historically, green beans were shipped to a plant in Europe or North America, decaffeinated there, and shipped back. The added value stayed in the North. The recent processes are practiced in Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, sometimes on the farm.

Ethyl acetate on mucilage. A variant of the sugarcane process: instead of treating the dry bean after drying, the solvent is applied while the bean is still in its fermented pulp, or just after pulping. The idea is that the sugars of the mucilage, that gelatinous, sugary layer that sticks to the bean, take part in the transfer and limit the leaching of aromas. It is also a farm operation, which does not require shipping the lot to Manizales.

The thermal shock. A rapid alternation of hot and cold baths to make the cell work, expansion then contraction, and force the caffeine out with less prolonged soaking. Soaking is what leaches the most.

Yeast inoculation and carbonic maceration. Both borrow from the vocabulary of post-harvest processing rather than that of chemistry: coffee is fermented under a CO₂ atmosphere, or with a selected yeast strain, and a drop in caffeine is obtained along with a modified aroma profile. The point to keep in mind, and serious houses say so: these routes give low-caffeine coffee, not necessarily decaf in the regulatory sense. Getting below 0.1% is another matter than dropping by 30%.

These announcements must be read with the caution applied to the rest of coffee. The literature available in 2026 is mostly commercial: few peer-reviewed papers, few independent measurements of residual caffeine, and a vocabulary (“natural,” “chemical-free”) that means nothing in chemistry, since water and CO₂ are chemicals too. The trend is real, the figures remain to be established.

Comunicaffe, Frequent Coffee expands specialty decaf lineup, 2026; The Coffee Vine, How decaf coffee is made; Coffee Review, Decaf coffees 2026; weak evidence, commercial sources

On the side of the established processes, the movement is rather toward capacity. Swiss Water announced an 82,000-square-foot extension, about 7,600 m², in Delta, British Columbia, to be added to its existing line in Burnaby. A company does not enlarge a plant of pressurized vessels for a market it judges passing.

Swiss Water, Swiss Water's new decaffeination flagship, accessed on 09/18/2026