Adulteration
As soon as coffee was ground outside the home, it stopped being recognizable, and anything that browns in the fire could take its place. This plate follows the adulteration of coffee from the chicory licenses of Brunswick in 1770 to the Brazilian seizures of May 2026: the substitutes, the molded beans, the lead colorants, the chemists who put the microscope on the cup, the laws that moved fraud rather than eliminating it, the wartime ersatz, then modern fraud on species and origin and the instruments that track it. The primary sources are Thurber (1881), Walsh (1894) and Ukers (1922), read through chapter 10 of Marco's unpublished book, supplemented by regulatory texts and by the analytical literature from 2011 to 2026.
The 17 sections of this plate
Each section has its own page. The first sentence says what you will find there.
- 01What makes fraud possibleThe second condition is the price gap. Coffee is expensive; peas, rye and chicory root are worth almost nothing and grow in any field in northern Europe.
- 02Chicory, from Brunswick to the Continental BlockadeThe substitute is almost as old as coffee:
- 03The inventory of substitutesWalsh's list for ground coffee reads like a market gardener's order.
- 04Dyeing, polishing, sweating: fraud on green coffeePoor-quality Brazilian Rio does not have the color the buyer expects.
- 05Molded fake beansAt the top of the genre, one no longer substitutes one coffee for another; one manufactures the bean.
- 06Ground coffee: the thousand-pound formulaThurber recorded in 1881 a blend formula commonly sold under the name of coffee in the United States.
- 07Glazing and its patentsGlazing coats still-hot roasted coffee with a preparation that forms a film as it cools: starches, glues, Irish moss, gelatin, isinglass.
- 08The chemists: Accum, Hassall, the microscope and the ovenFriedrich Accum published in London in 1820 a book with a blunt title: A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons.
- 09The laws, country by countrySome country had to legislate first, and it was Great Britain, under pressure from the Lancet.
- 10The substitute becomes an industry: Postum and the “cereal-fakers”American law cleaned up the label, not the advertising.
- 11Taste manufactured by habitMarco's book advances a hypothesis and holds it for what it is.
- 12Wartime ersatz: 1914, 1939, 1977The German Democratic Republic offers the best-dated case, and the chain of causes there is complete, from frost to cup.
- 13Instant coffee and today's blendsIndustrial instant coffee dates from the years 1935-1938, and it weighs far more than one imagines in France.
- 14Modern fraud: the species, the origin, the vatWhen a bean is paid for by its name, it is the name that is manufactured.
- 15Animal coffees, or rent-seeking on the storyKopi luwak is not alone: five animals today serve the same selling point.
- 16Today's detection toolsChromatography has replaced the microscope.
- 17TodayIn 2025-2026, adulteration took up its two historical forms again, under price pressure.
Elsewhere on the site, the passages that deal with the same things as this page. Computed from the text, not picked by hand.