Ground coffee: the thousand-pound formula
The laws and the dates
| Date | Country | Text or fact |
|---|---|---|
| 1769-1770 | Brunswick, Berlin | Licenses to manufacture chicory coffee granted to C. von Heine and C. G. Förster; 22 to 24 factories in Brunswick in 1795 |
| 1777, 1781 | Prussia | Frederick II's coffee and beer manifesto; then royal roasting monopoly, licenses reserved for nobles, clergy and civil servants |
| 1784 | Duchy of Westphalia | Ban on selling coffee, fine of one hundred dollars or two years in prison |
| 1785 | United States | Governor Bowdoin introduces chicory into Massachusetts |
| 1806-1812 | Napoleonic Europe | Continental Blockade: coffee shortage, industrial rise of chicory in France and Germany |
| 1837 | France | First French patent for a coffee substitute (François Burlet, Lyon) |
| 1851-1855 | United Kingdom | Analytical Sanitary Commission of the Lancet (Wakley, Hassall): 31 coffee samples out of 34 adulterated; parliamentary committee of 1855 |
| 1860, 1872, 1875 | United Kingdom | Adulteration of Food or Drink Act; Adulteration of Food, Drink and Drugs Act; Sale of Food and Drugs Act, which repeals the two previous ones |
| 1873 | United States | First American patent for a coffee substitute (E. Dugdale, Griffin, Georgia) |
| 1905 | France | Law of August 1 on the repression of fraud in the sale of goods and the adulteration of foodstuffs |
| 1906 (in force Jan. 1, 1907) | United States | Pure Food and Drugs Act: chicory must be declared on the label, end of fake “Mocha and Java,” rulings against artificially “sweated” coffee (1916: only coffee from the island of Java may be called Java) |
| 1931 ; 2012 | Colombia | Law 126: the name coffee reserved for pure coffee; law 1589: 95% threshold of the International Agreement |
| 1958 | Nicaragua | Decree 408 prohibiting the sale of adulterated coffee, sugar excepted |
| 1977-1978 | GDR | Kaffee-Mix with 51% coffee, withdrawn after more than a year |
| 1991 | Japan | Fair competition code: the word coffee reserved for products made solely from green coffee |
| 1991 ; 2001 | France | Decree 91-340 (denominations green, roasted, ground and decaffeinated coffee); decree 2001-977 transposing the extracts directive |
| 1999 | European Union | Directive 1999/4/EC on coffee and chicory extracts (coffee dry matter of at least 95% for solid extract) |
| 2001 | Germany | Kaffeeverordnung: more than 2 g/kg of foreign matter prohibited in roasted coffee unless labeled unsorted or low-quality coffee |
| 2007 | ICO (International Agreement) | Article 27: ban on selling under the name coffee a product containing less than the equivalent of 95% green coffee |
| 2011 (applicable 2014) | European Union | Regulation 1169/2011: list of ingredients, QUID, ban on misleading consumers (art. 7) |
| 2010-2011 ; 2022-2023 | Brazil | Regulation 16 (impurities 1%, moisture 5%, minimum score 4/10); Portaria SDA 570 art. 43: the word coffee prohibited for any blend |
| 2023 (applicable Dec. 30, 2026) | European Union | Regulation 2023/1115 “deforestation”: geolocation of coffee plots mandatory |
Thurber recorded in 1881 a blend formula commonly sold under the name of coffee in the United States. It reads for 1,000 pounds of finished product.
- Peas400 pounds
- Rye200 pounds
- Chicory100 pounds
- Miscellaneous, unspecified100 pounds
- Coffee200 pounds
A fifth of coffee in the coffee. And the figure is given as a commonplace of the trade, by a merchant who buys it every day: it is that tone that informs, more than the recipe. Walsh reproduces it on page 217 in 1894.
The English list drawn up by Hassall, and taken up by Thurber, leaves economics and enters something else. It adds sawdust, Venetian red, an iron oxide pigment, and fragments of cooked liver of oxen and horses. The pigment is understandable, since it gives the expected color. What cooked liver was doing in a packet of coffee, the list does not say.
Blending is not always a deception, however. In New Orleans as in northern France, chicory was a claimed taste, sold under its own name. Fraud begins only with the silence of the label.
Thurber 1881, p. 163, 165; Walsh 1894, p. 217; Ukers 1922, p. 404Recycling closes the loop. Dried coffee grounds are resold at 12 dollars a barrel by the quartermaster of a military hospital to people who, in the phrase of the day, re-flavor them by the transforming hand of modern chemistry before putting them back into packets with bombastic labels. The coffee is sold, drunk, thrown out, collected, re-scented, repackaged, resold, with a nicer package at the end than at the start. The liquid coffee extracts of the 1900s, writes Ukers, were mostly blends of caramel and badly prepared extracts of chicory, roasted cereals and cheap coffee, and they fermented.
Thurber 1881, p. 164; Walsh 1894, p. 209; Ukers 1922, p. 169Key figures
| Figure | Source |
|---|---|
| Common formula in the United States in 1881, per 1,000 pounds: 400 peas, 200 rye, 200 coffee, 100 chicory, 100 miscellaneous | Thurber 1881, p. 165 |
| Dried coffee grounds resold at 12 dollars a barrel by a military hospital quartermaster | Thurber 1881, p. 164 |
| Glazing: 5 to 6% added weight | Thurber 1881, p. 167 |
| Commercial chicory cut with up to 95% beet | Walsh 1894, p. 215 |
| 31 coffee samples out of 34 adulterated in London | Lancet, January 1851 |
| Nearly 100 cereal-substitute firms; 1,765,000 dollars of advertising against coffee in a single year | Ukers 1922, p. 435 |
| Kaffee-Mix: 51% coffee, 4 marks per 125 g | Kaffeekrise in der DDR, 1977 |
| 6 “100% arabica” coffees out of 60 contain 3 to 33% canephora | Gunning et al., Food Chemistry, 2018 |
| Brazil, May 25-28, 2026: 84 inspections, 19 factories closed, 82 tonnes seized | Clarim, May 30, 2026 |
| Instant coffee: about 21% of the world's green coffee, more than 30% of cups | Professional training document, Tout savoir sur le café soluble |
In this plateThe 17 sections
- 01What makes fraud possible
- 02Chicory, from Brunswick to the Continental Blockade
- 03The inventory of substitutes
- 04Dyeing, polishing, sweating: fraud on green coffee
- 05Molded fake beans
- 06Ground coffee: the thousand-pound formula
- 07Glazing and its patents
- 08The chemists: Accum, Hassall, the microscope and the oven
- 09The laws, country by country
- 10The substitute becomes an industry: Postum and the “cereal-fakers”
- 11Taste manufactured by habit
- 12Wartime ersatz: 1914, 1939, 1977
- 13Instant coffee and today's blends
- 14Modern fraud: the species, the origin, the vat
- 15Animal coffees, or rent-seeking on the story
- 16Today's detection tools
- 17Today
The table of contents, with the first sentence of each section