Picture a room full of focused judges, each one bent over a row of small white cups, lifting a spoon with practiced precision, slurping loudly, pausing, writing a number. The air smells like roasted earth and ripe fruit. Outside, the Pacific stretches toward the horizon and the green slopes of the Kona belt roll upward into afternoon clouds. Inside, a family farm's entire year is being evaluated in about fifteen minutes.
That is what the cupping competition at the Kona Coffee Cultural Festival looks like. And for the small, multigenerational farms that hand-pick every cherry on those slopes, a ribbon from that room is not just a decoration. It is validation. It is proof that the volcanic soil, the careful processing, and the early mornings mattered. It is something a farmer can point to and say: this is what we made, and the best palates in the room agreed it was exceptional.
Kona coffee awards and competitions are not pageantry. They are the backbone of quality assurance in one of the most imitated and misrepresented coffee regions on earth. They guide buyers through a crowded marketplace full of "Kona blends" that may contain as little as ten percent actual Kona beans. They push farms to refine their craft year after year. And they celebrate a coffee-growing tradition that has been alive on the Big Island for nearly two centuries.
If you have ever wondered what an award actually means on a bag of Kona coffee, how the judging works, which farms are winning and why, or how you can taste competition-caliber coffee for yourself, this guide was written for you. We will walk through the major competitions, explain the science behind the scores, share our own story here at Buddha's Cup in Holualoa, and give you everything you need to experience award-winning Kona coffee at the source. If you are just beginning to explore this world, our complete resource on what is Kona coffee is a great place to start alongside this article.
The Culture of Competition in Kona Coffee Country
Competition is not something that was imported into the Kona coffee world by marketing consultants or specialty coffee trends. It grew here organically, the same way the coffee itself grows, shaped by the land, the community, and the pride that comes from farming something extraordinary in one of the most beautiful places on earth. To understand why competitions matter so much in this region, you first have to understand what it means to be a Kona coffee farmer.
A Festival That Has Crowned Champions for Over 50 Years
The Kona Coffee Cultural Festival is the heartbeat of competition culture in this region. The 2026 edition marks the 56th festival, which means this event has been running since 1970, more than half a century of celebrating, evaluating, and elevating the coffee that defines this stretch of the Big Island. That kind of longevity is rare in any agricultural tradition, and it speaks to how deeply the festival is woven into the community's identity.
The festival is not only about competition. It encompasses a wide range of events, including historical exhibits that trace the Japanese-American families who built the Kona coffee industry, the beloved lantern parade, a coffee and art stroll through the towns of the Kona belt, the Miss Kona Coffee Scholarship Pageant, live music, and farm tours that open private land to visitors for a few precious days each year. At the center of all of it is the Cupping Competition, the event where farms submit their best beans to blind evaluation by trained judges using standardized protocols.
For multigenerational farming families, the festival carries emotional weight that goes beyond any single year's results. Grandparents who remember picking coffee by hand as children watch their grandchildren submit beans to the same competition they once entered. The Kona Coffee Cultural Festival is as much a reunion as it is a contest, a moment each November when the farming community gathers to share what this land has produced and to honor the people who tend it.
For visitors who have never attended, the experience of walking through the festival and tasting coffees that have just been evaluated by professional judges is something genuinely memorable. You are not just drinking coffee. You are tasting the result of a specific farm's specific choices about variety, elevation, harvest timing, and processing, all brought into focus by competition.
Why Small Farms Compete and Why It Matters to You
There are over 100 farms on the Kona belt that produce and sell coffee under their own label. Most of them are small, family-operated operations, some covering just a few acres on the slopes above Kailua-Kona, Holualoa, or Captain Cook. On average, 50 to 60 farms enter the Kona Cupping Classic at the annual festival each year. That is a significant portion of the region's producers, all competing blind, all trusting that the quality of what they grew will speak for itself.
Why do they do it? The answers are layered. At the most practical level, a competition medal is marketing. In a marketplace where the name "Kona" has been diluted by blends and misleading labeling, a verified award from a blind cupping gives buyers a clear signal that this bag contains something real. For visitors browsing a farm store or an online shop, the difference between a bag that says "Kona-style" and a bag that says "First Place, Kona Cupping Competition" is enormous, and buyers increasingly understand that.
Beyond marketing, competition is validation. Farming is physically demanding, financially uncertain, and subject to weather, pests, and market fluctuations that no farmer controls. When a panel of trained judges scores your coffee in the high 80s, it confirms that the choices you made, the pruning, the timing of the harvest, the method you used to process the cherry, the temperature at which you roasted the bean, all of it added up to something genuinely excellent. That confirmation matters deeply to the people who put months of labor into every bag.
For you as a buyer, this competitive culture does something important. It creates a navigational tool in a market that can be confusing. Navigating Kona coffee labeling is genuinely difficult when grocery store shelves carry blends with photographs of Hawaiian volcanoes that contain only a fraction of real Kona coffee. Competition results, especially from blind evaluations, cut through the noise. They tell you which farms are producing beans that professionals chose without knowing the source.
The Role of Terroir and Processing in Competitive Success
Kona coffee's reputation for competition success is not accidental. The conditions on the Kona belt create a naturally favorable environment for growing coffee of exceptional quality. The volcanic soil, rich in minerals and excellent in drainage, provides nutrients that show up in the cup as complexity and depth. Elevations ranging from about 1,000 to 3,000 feet give farms the cooler temperatures that slow the development of the coffee cherry and allow sugars to build gradually. The afternoon cloud cover that rolls in from the Pacific almost every day acts as a natural shade canopy, protecting the plants from harsh midday sun and extending the growing window.
These conditions are not replicable anywhere else in the world in exactly this combination. That is what terroir means in the context of coffee, and it is why Kona has been winning competitions since long before specialty coffee was a recognized industry category.
What has changed in recent years is the growing sophistication of processing decisions. Farms now experiment deliberately with pulped, natural, and honey processing methods, sometimes specifically to perform better in certain competition categories. The science of post-harvest processing has become as important to competitive success as the growing conditions themselves.
The October 2026 newsletter from the Kona Coffee Farmers Association highlighted a compelling trend: non-Gesha varieties are now winning major competitions including the Global Coffee Awards and Cup of Excellence, with local terroir and careful processing helping other varieties beat the Gesha, which had dominated specialty coffee competitions worldwide for years. This is a significant development, suggesting that what Kona and Ka'u farmers are doing with their local varieties, when combined with thoughtful processing, is producing results that beat even the most celebrated specialty variety in the world. The Kona coffee flavor profile that emerges from this combination is something judges are recognizing with top scores, and it is something you can taste for yourself.
The Major Kona Coffee Competitions, Explained
Not all competitions are equal, and not all awards carry the same weight. Understanding which competitions matter, how they are structured, and what a win actually represents will help you make sense of the credentials you see on bags and farm websites. Here is a clear breakdown of the competitions where Big Island coffee earns recognition.
The Kona Coffee Cultural Festival Cupping Competition
This is the premier local competition and the one that carries the most community significance for Kona belt farmers. The cupping competition uses the Specialty Coffee Association protocol, which is the global industry standard for evaluating coffee quality. Judges evaluate each sample blind, meaning they do not know which farm produced the coffee they are scoring.
The SCA cupping form breaks evaluation into ten attributes: fragrance and aroma, which covers what the dry and wet grounds smell like before tasting begins; flavor, the main characteristic of the brewed coffee across the entire palate; aftertaste, the quality and duration of the impression left after swallowing; acidity, evaluated not just for presence but for quality and how well it contributes to the overall experience; body, the tactile weight and texture of the liquid; balance, how well all the elements work together; uniformity, consistency across multiple cups of the same sample; clean cup, the absence of off-flavors or defects; sweetness, the perception of natural sugars; and overall, the judge's holistic impression that may capture something not captured by the individual categories.
Scores above 80 points are considered specialty grade, meaning the coffee is free of significant defects and has distinct positive characteristics. At the Kona Cupping Competition, winning scores typically sit in the mid-to-high 80s. The difference between an 83-point coffee and an 87-point coffee is real and perceptible to anyone who tastes them side by side, but it represents a narrow margin that is often determined by specific processing decisions or the particular strengths of a given year's harvest.
A podium finish at this competition transforms a farm's visibility almost immediately. Visitors who attend the festival ask for the winners by name. Online stores see traffic spikes. Local restaurants and cafes reach out for wholesale relationships. The award functions as a year-long marketing asset because it represents a judgment made by trained professionals, not a vote by loyal customers. Our resource on award-winning Kona coffee heritage gives more context for how this tradition has shaped the region's identity over decades.
Best of Hawai'i and the Road to International Recognition
The Best of Hawai'i competition serves as a bridge between the regional stage of the Kona Cupping Classic and the global specialty coffee market. It draws entries from across the Hawaiian Islands and judges them using SCA protocols, but it also includes an auction component that sends winning lots to international buyers, introducing the highest-scoring Hawaiian coffees to roasters and specialty retailers worldwide.
The 2026 results illustrate both the competitive quality of Big Island farms and the expanding diversity of winners. In the Innovative Division for Pulped coffees, Hanauna Coffee Company from Kona took first place with an SL34 variety scoring 86.94. In the Innovative Division for Unpulped coffees, Miranda's Farms from Ka'u won with a Gesha at 87.84. Both scores represent genuine excellence at a level that commands attention from international buyers.
The auction component is what gives Best of Hawai'i its particular financial significance. Winning lots are sold at auction to buyers who are often willing to pay substantial premiums for verified, top-scoring Hawaiian coffee. This creates a direct financial incentive for farms to pursue quality with the same intensity they would apply to any other business investment. The logic is straightforward: a coffee that scores 87 at Best of Hawai'i can command auction prices that are multiples of the standard wholesale rate, which means that every dollar invested in better processing equipment, better farm management, or more careful harvest selection has a measurable return when competition results are good.
For consumers, Best of Hawai'i results are a highly reliable quality signal. The competition is rigorous, the judging is blind, and the auction process means that the market itself assigns additional value to the top performers. When you see a Best of Hawai'i placement on a bag of coffee, you are looking at a bean that competed against the best Hawaii had to offer in that year and came out near the top.
Global Competitions Where Big Island Coffee Earns Recognition
Beyond Hawaii's borders, Big Island coffee has been earning recognition on international stages that evaluate coffee from producing regions all over the world. These competitions are significant because they place Kona and Ka'u coffees in direct comparison with the most celebrated coffees from Ethiopia, Colombia, Panama, and elsewhere, and in many cases, Hawaiian coffee holds its own.
The Global Coffee Awards represent one of the most significant international platforms where Big Island farms have recently made their mark. Kona Earth won the Overall Winner designation for Hawaii, submitting roasted samples of their 100% Kona Coffee and Hawaiian Espresso for evaluation. An overall winner designation at a global competition puts a Kona farm in a category of international excellence that extends far beyond any regional conversation.
The AVPA, or Association for the Valorization of Agricultural Products, based in Paris, is another prestigious international competition body where Hawaiian coffee has earned recognition. The AVPA evaluates agricultural products with a rigorous methodology developed in France, and its awards carry significant weight in European specialty food and beverage markets. We will talk more about our own AVPA experience in a later section, but it is worth noting here as a competition that has helped put Hawaiian coffee on the map for European buyers and specialty retailers who might not otherwise encounter it. Our FAQ on the AVPA medal explains the organization's methodology in more detail.
Ka'u, the district on the southern slopes of the Big Island, has earned a surprising number of international awards relative to its market profile. Despite being less recognized by name than Kona among mainstream consumers, Ka'u coffee has outperformed expectations at international competitions for more than a decade, which is a testament to the quality potential of volcanic Hawaiian soil across different microclimates and elevations.
Buddha's Cup in the Winner's Circle
We are proud of what we have grown and what we have earned, but we want to tell this story honestly because that is how we do things here on the farm in Holualoa. Competition medals did not come easily, and they did not come without learning. Every award in our history represents not just a successful submission but a decision we made somewhere in the growing, harvesting, or processing chain that turned out to be right, and a lesson we carried forward to the next season.
Our Awards Journey, From Local Cups to International Stages
When we first entered competition, the experience was humbling in the best possible way. Submitting your coffee to blind evaluation means letting go of the story, the relationship, and the farm name, and trusting entirely that what is in the cup is enough. That is a vulnerable position for any farmer, and it is one that changes how you think about every step of production. You start to see your own coffee through the eyes of a stranger with a trained palate, which is a different and clarifying perspective.
Our second-place recognition at Best Coffee Growers in West Hawaii was an early validation that what we were doing on our Holualoa acreage was genuinely competitive among the farms in our region. West Hawaii is a competitive field. The farms here have been growing coffee for generations, and placing in that company was meaningful.
The four awards at the World Coffee Challenge in 2022 represented a step up in scale. Submitting to a competition that evaluates coffees from across the globe, not just within the Kona belt or even within Hawaii, meant placing our beans in a much larger field of comparison. Coming away with four distinct recognitions in a single competition year told us clearly that the work we had been doing on processing consistency and harvest selection was showing up in the cup in ways that judges around the world could identify and reward.
The First Place Crown Division Award for our Imagine 100% Kona Coffee is one we are particularly proud of because it reflects everything we believe about what Kona coffee can be when it is grown with intention and processed with care. The Imagine is a coffee we have put enormous effort into, and having it recognized at the first-place level in a competitive blind evaluation gives us confidence that those efforts are translating directly into the quality of what ends up in your cup.
The AVPA Paris Recognition and What It Taught Us
Submitting to the AVPA in Paris was a different kind of challenge from domestic competitions. The AVPA evaluates agricultural products using a methodology developed specifically for assessing the quality of food and beverage items in the context of their market positioning and production standards. Judges include culinary professionals, buyers, and specialty food experts who bring a European palate and perspective to the evaluation.
Our Gourmet Bronze Award at the 2022 AVPA told us that our coffee communicated well to an international audience with no prior relationship to the Kona story. That is a meaningful distinction. Winning a local competition has the support of community context, the judges may understand the challenges of a Hawaiian harvest year, the significance of a particular processing method on these specific slopes. An international judge in Paris has none of that context. They simply taste what is in the cup, and their score reflects only what the coffee itself delivers.
What the AVPA also recognized was something that speaks to the breadth of what we do here at Buddha's Cup. Our tea also earned recognition at that same 2022 competition. Buddha's Cup tea won three awards at AVPA Paris 2022, which reflects our commitment to quality that extends well beyond coffee. We grow mamaki tea on the farm, a native Hawaiian plant with a long history of use in traditional Hawaiian healing practices. Mamaki has been associated with supporting healthy blood pressure, digestion, and overall wellness, and it makes a beautiful, naturally caffeine-free cup that stands on its own merits entirely apart from coffee. Having that tea recognized by an international agricultural award body confirms that our approach to farming quality extends across everything we grow.
Competing internationally sharpened our processes in specific ways. We became more attentive to consistency across the entire lot we were submitting, because international competitions often evaluate multiple cups from the same sample to check for uniformity. We became more precise in our roasting documentation, tracking time and temperature curves with more rigor so that we could replicate a great roast reliably. And we became more confident in our identity as a farm that is not just regionally competitive but internationally relevant.
What Our Awards Mean for the Coffee in Your Cup
We want to be transparent about something: awards do not make the coffee taste good automatically. What they do is create a trail of accountability. When we submit to competition, we commit to producing the same quality in every bag we sell that we put before a panel of judges. The processing decisions that earned a First Place Crown Division Award are the same decisions we apply to the production runs that go out to our customers.
Every coffee we submit to competition is grown here in Holualoa, on the slopes above Kailua-Kona, at an elevation where the volcanic soil and afternoon cloud cover create the conditions that make Kona coffee what it is. It is hand-picked by people who know this farm and know what a ripe cherry looks and feels like. It is processed on-farm, so we control every step from cherry to green bean. When a panel of judges assigns a high score to that coffee, they are validating the entire chain, not just the roast.
For you, that means the award on a bag of Buddha's Cup coffee is a reflection of a complete farming system, not a single lucky batch. If you want to explore what that looks and tastes like across our range, our page on the award-winning Kona coffee experience gives a fuller picture of how our competition results connect to the specific coffees available for purchase.
Other Notable Big Island Farms and Their Competition Stories
We believe in the community of Kona coffee farming, and that means celebrating what our neighbors are achieving as well. The competition landscape here is not a zero-sum game. When any Big Island farm earns recognition at a local or global level, it strengthens the case for the entire region. Here are some of the farms and stories worth knowing.
Farms That Have Made Their Mark in Kona Competitions
Hula Daddy Kona Coffee is a name that comes up in almost any serious conversation about Kona competition history. This boutique operation covers about 30 acres and has earned multiple wins at the Kona Coffee Cupping Competition over the years. Perhaps most notably, Coffee Review rated Hula Daddy's coffee as the number one coffee in the world from a field of more than 5,000 evaluated coffees, a remarkable designation that brought significant international attention to what a small Kona farm could produce.
What makes Hula Daddy's story instructive is the combination of factors behind their success. They farm a relatively small acreage with a level of attention to detail that becomes harder to maintain at larger scale. They have experimented aggressively with variety selection and processing, and their results reflect that investment. They are also located in a microclimate zone that consistently produces coffee with the acidity and body profile that judges reward.
Hanauna Coffee Company's first-place finish in the 2026 Best of Hawai'i Innovative Pulped Division, with an SL34 scoring 86.94, represents a newer name making a significant statement. SL34 is a Kenyan variety originally developed by Scott Laboratories, and seeing it perform at this level in a Kona farm setting demonstrates the kind of variety experimentation that is pushing the boundaries of what Big Island coffee can be.
The pattern across the top-performing farms in regional competitions is geographically consistent. Farms in the Holualoa and Captain Cook corridor tend to cluster near the top of regional competitions year after year. The microclimate conditions in this stretch of the Kona belt, with its specific elevation range, rainfall pattern, and volcanic soil composition, seem to produce coffee that judges respond to reliably. That is not a coincidence. It is terroir expressing itself in scores.
Ka'u's Quiet Rise as a Competition Powerhouse
Ka'u sits on the southern slopes of the Big Island, below the flanks of Mauna Loa, in a region that gets more rainfall and has a different volcanic soil composition from the Kona belt. For years, Ka'u was largely unknown to coffee consumers outside Hawaii, overshadowed by the established reputation and aggressive marketing of the Kona name. What has become impossible to ignore, however, is Ka'u's competition record.
Miranda's Farms, based in Ka'u, took first place in the Best of Hawai'i Innovative Unpulped Division in 2026, submitting a Gesha that scored 87.84. That score, in a category where processing method is itself part of what is being evaluated, represents a coffee of genuine international caliber. And this result is not an outlier. Ka'u has been earning international competition recognition at a rate that far exceeds what its market profile would suggest for well over a decade.
What Ka'u's success means for the broader Hawaiian coffee competition landscape is significant. It is pushing Kona farmers to innovate rather than relying solely on the established brand power of the Kona name. When a region with less name recognition is beating well-known farms in blind evaluation, it is a signal that quality, not reputation, is what wins in the judging room. That is a healthy pressure that benefits the entire Hawaiian coffee industry and ultimately benefits you as a consumer.
Kona Earth and the Global Coffee Awards
Kona Earth's designation as Overall Winner for Hawaii at the Global Coffee Awards, based on submissions of their 100% Kona Coffee and Hawaiian Espresso, is the kind of recognition that creates international demand almost immediately. When a coffee from a specific region wins an overall designation at a competition that evaluates coffees from producing countries worldwide, it signals to international roasters, retailers, and consumers that this region is capable of competing at the highest level.
The community benefit of a win like this extends well beyond Kona Earth itself. When one Kona farm wins globally, it reinforces consumer trust in the entire region's product. It makes the conversation about authentic Kona coffee easier to have because there is a concrete, internationally verified example of what Kona can achieve. This is especially important given the ongoing struggle against fraudulent blends and mislabeled products that have damaged consumer confidence in the Kona name. The challenges facing Kona coffee as an industry are real, and global competition wins are one of the most effective tools the region has for reestablishing the authentic value of the name.
When buyers see that a Kona farm has won at the Global Coffee Awards level, they are less susceptible to the marketing of cheap blends that trade on the Kona name without delivering Kona quality. Competition results at this level raise the floor of what consumers expect, and that expectation ultimately protects the market for every honest farmer on the belt.
How Kona Coffee Is Judged: The Science Behind the Scores
Coffee competitions can seem mysterious from the outside, with judges slurping loudly from spoons and writing cryptic numbers on forms. But the process is actually grounded in a rigorous, standardized methodology that is designed to be as objective as possible given the inherently subjective nature of taste. Understanding how judging works will help you read competition results more intelligently and make better decisions about the coffee you buy.
The SCA Cupping Protocol and Why It's the Industry Standard
The Specialty Coffee Association cupping protocol is used by virtually every serious coffee competition in the world, including all the major competitions where Big Island farms submit their beans. The protocol standardizes the conditions of evaluation so that results are comparable across different days, different judges, and different competitions.
The process begins with grinding. Samples are ground to a specific coarseness immediately before evaluation to maximize freshness. Judges evaluate the dry grounds first, noting the fragrance, the aromatic quality of the coffee before water is added. Hot water is then poured over the grounds at a standardized temperature, and judges allow the coffee to steep for exactly four minutes. During this time they evaluate the wet aroma, what the grounds smell like after blooming with water.
Breaking the crust is the next step and one of the most dramatic moments of a cupping. Judges push through the layer of grounds floating on the surface of each cup with a spoon and inhale the trapped aroma that releases. They record their aroma scores at this point. Then the grounds are skimmed from the surface, and tasting begins once the coffee cools to an appropriate temperature.
Slurping is deliberate and vigorous. The loud slurp aerosolizes the coffee across the entire palate, ensuring that every taste receptor is engaged simultaneously. Judges work through each of the ten SCA attributes for every cup in the flight, writing scores typically on a scale where each attribute can contribute up to 10 points and the total possible score is 100. Coffees above 80 are specialty grade. The gap between an 83-point coffee and an 87-point coffee is real: 87 represents a coffee with distinctly positive characteristics that elevate it above baseline quality in ways that most trained palates can perceive.
Blind evaluation is what gives these scores integrity. Judges do not know which farm produced the coffee they are scoring. They cannot be influenced by reputation, relationship, or packaging. The only thing that determines the score is what is in the cup, which makes the results a genuinely reliable signal of quality.
Processing Methods and Their Impact on Competition Scores
How a coffee cherry is processed after harvest fundamentally changes what ends up in the cup, and consequently what a judge scores. This is why competitions like Best of Hawai'i separate pulped and unpulped categories: the two categories are essentially evaluating different expressions of the same raw material, and comparing them directly would be like comparing a fresh apple to apple juice.
Washed or pulped processing removes the fruit from the seed quickly after harvest, allowing the bean's inherent characteristics to dominate the flavor profile. Judges evaluating washed coffees are looking for clarity, brightness, and the clean expression of variety and terroir. Natural or unpulped processing allows the cherry to dry around the seed, which means the bean absorbs sugars and fruit flavors from the surrounding pulp over days or weeks. Natural coffees tend to be heavier in body, more fruit-forward, and sometimes more complex in ways that some judges find exciting and others find distracting from the bean's pure character. Honey processing is a middle ground where some but not all of the fruit is removed before drying, producing a cup that shares characteristics of both methods.
The 2026 trend data from the Kona Coffee Farmers Association is particularly interesting in this context. Non-Gesha varieties are now beating Gesha at major competitions when the terroir is right and the processing is careful. This suggests that processing decisions have become skilled enough to amplify the natural advantages of Hawaiian-grown coffee regardless of variety, which is a development that speaks well for the future of Big Island farms in global competition. We have adjusted our own processing decisions at Buddha's Cup based on competition feedback over the years, and those adjustments show up directly in the scores our submissions have earned. Curious about the foundation of it all? Our resource on Kona coffee beans explains the starting material we work with every season.
What Consumers Can Learn from Competition Scores
Competition results are a shopping tool, and they are more useful than most marketing language you will encounter on coffee packaging. Here is how to use them.
When you see a score of 86 or higher from a blind cupping competition using SCA protocol, that is a meaningful signal. It means a trained judge, without knowing the source, found the coffee to be distinctly above specialty threshold and to have positive characteristics worth rewarding. That is not marketing language. That is a professional evaluation, and it is reproducible: other trained palates presented with the same coffee under the same conditions will tend to agree within a few points.
Look for specific competition credentials on packaging rather than vague claims like "world's best" or "highest quality." "First Place, Kona Coffee Cultural Festival Cupping Competition" or "Best of Hawai'i Pulped Division Winner" tells you something precise. "Award-winning" without further specification tells you almost nothing.
The most reliable way to taste competition-caliber coffee is to buy directly from award-winning farms rather than from grocery store blends. Blends that carry the Kona name but contain mostly non-Kona coffee cannot produce the flavor characteristics that earn high competition scores, because those characteristics come from the specific growing conditions of the Kona belt. When you buy from a farm that competes and wins in blind evaluation, you are getting the same beans, from the same trees, grown the same way, as