When a bean is paid for by its name, it is the name that is manufactured. The most profitable fraud of the 21st century sells canephora as arabica. In 2018, Kate Kemsley's team at the Quadram Institute in Norwich analyzed 60 roasted ground coffees labeled 100% arabica from 11 countries: 8 exceeded the authenticity threshold, 6 contained from 3 to 33% non-arabica, which suggests, with a 95% confidence interval, a sector prevalence of 5 to 20%. The method relies on 16-O-methylcafestol, a diterpene of the canephora wax, measured by NMR at 60 MHz on a chloroform extract; the surprise is that pure arabicas contain traces of it, on the order of 1 to 2% of the canephora level, which imposes a statistical threshold rather than an absence. The brands tested were not named.

Gunning et al., Food Chemistry, May 2018, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5774150; dailycoffeenews.com, May 16, 2018

Brazil, the leading producer, replays the thousand-pound formula in 2025. The mechanism has not changed since Thurber, only the price has risen: arabica records bring out a “fake coffee” sold at 13.99 reais per 500 grams in January 2025, according to the ABIC.

The product does not quite lie. It is labeled in small print “powder for preparation of coffee-flavored drink.” The word coffee is not claimed, only suggested, and that is precisely the zone the law handles worst.

The Ministry of Agriculture inspected three factories in February 2025, in São Paulo, Paraná and Santa Catarina. It found husks, black and burnt defective beans, and flavorings. It did not find the advertised coffee pulp.

The dispute then turns on a word. The ABIC speaks of fraud. The manufacturers invoke their denomination and their health authorization. But ANVISA's RDC 716/2022 calls nothing coffee but the roasted endosperm of a species of Coffea. Everything else in the cherry, the husk included, is therefore not coffee.

The seizures tell the scale of the phenomenon. Over 2025, the ministry seized 40 tonnes of roasted ground coffee in Paraná, 2.4 tonnes at Campos dos Goytacazes and 4.2 tonnes of husks ready to roast at Brusque.

Then the operation changes scale. From May 25 to 28, 2026, a national action led with Senacon and the Procons conducted 84 inspections in seven states. It closed 19 establishments, or 32.8% of the sites visited, and seized 5,944 kilos of packaged coffee and 76,070 kilos of irregular raw material: husks, sticks, soil and plant residues. Most of it was found in the Zona da Mata of Minas Gerais, that is, in the very heart of a producing region.

noticiasagricolas.com.br, February 20, 2025; nsctotal.com.br, February 19, 2025; semearfoodsafetyculture.com.br, January 17, 2026; clarim.net.br, May 30, 2026

Prestige coffees suffer the Aden fraud of Walsh, a century later and for the same reason: the name sells for more than the bean.

Kopi luwak is a coffee that has passed through the digestive tract of the civet. It sells for up to 1,300 dollars a kilo for the wild version, against 100 dollars for the farmed version. A thirteenfold gap, for a difference no buyer can verify in the cup. The fraud is written in advance.

The investigations by PETA and the BBC (2013) found caged civets sold as wild. The specialist press estimates that up to 80% of the kopi luwak on the world market is fake, but with no published study to back it. Jumhawan and his colleagues published in 2013 discriminating metabolomic markers, that is, molecules whose profile separates the digested bean from the ordinary bean.

The same gap targets rare origins. Jamaican Blue Mountain and Panamanian Geisha bear the brunt, at prices that make one dizzy: 1,029 dollars a pound for an Elida lot in 2019. Both are targets of a Chinese market where consumption grew by 44% in five years. Demand rising like that does not meet a harvest that keeps pace, and the gap is filled with fakes.

The response is twofold. Jamaica has instituted prison sentences for counterfeiting the label, and estates are experimenting with tracing from plant to cup.

So-called compatible capsules, for their part, are not a matter of fraud but of patent law, and the confusion is common enough that it needs saying. As early as March 2010, Jean-Paul Gaillard, a former Nespresso executive, launched capsules under the Casino brand. The courts of Düsseldorf and Paris refused to see counterfeiting in them.

What followed played out on the patent calendar and on competition. The first patent expired in 2012. The Competition Authority obtained in April 2014 the technical opening of the machines. In 2020, Nespresso was ordered to pay 500,000 euros for unfair competition toward Ethical Coffee Company.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_luwak, accessed September 7, 2026; intelligence.coffee, September 15, 2022; fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nespresso, accessed September 7, 2026