Cold brew coffee safety & compliance
Image: Pexels/Gizem Ipekci
The popularity around cold brew coffee remains strong with double-digit growth rates projected through 2030. As such, many businesses want to capitalise on the booming consumer interest in cold brew. However, safety issues do exist so in this exclusive article for T&CTJ, Mark Corey, PhD, aims to outline safety and compliance challenges for cold brew manufacturers and retailers.
Cold brew coffee has been a hot product for innovation for many brands and retailers seeking to refresh their product offerings and to dabble in the ready-to-drink (RTD) space. The cold brew category, which had a market size of USD $401 million in 2021, is projected to grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.7 percent between 2023 and 2030, per Skyquestt. Many businesses recognise this and want to capitalise on the increased consumer interest. As companies in the sector are ramping up for peak cold brew season, many consumers will have already been drinking theirs – 16 percent of Americans drank at least one cold brew in the past week, according to the January survey of the 2024 National Coffee Data Trends report.
Consumers like cold brew’s great taste, convenience, and health benefits. Americans under 40 years old are driving the consumption of cold brew, and this versatile and trendy beverage is especially popular with Gen Z as an afternoon pick-me-up. This adds an even greater incentive for operators to get involved in the cold brew and cold coffee space.
As manufacturers and retailers are learning more about cold brew, it is important that they become familiar with cold brew food safety and the regulations and considerations underpinning this area. Coffee continues to be one of the safest foods in America – but as with any evolving area, science, facts, and expert advice can help assure that operators comply and use best practices in their business. As such, the purpose of this article is to detail some of the current challenges around safety and compliance for cold brew manufacturers and retailers.
What is cold brew coffee?
Between 2016 and 2017, several leading experts from across the coffee industry came to the National Coffee Association of USA, Inc (NCA), concerned that the lack of a common definition of “cold brew coffee” could lead to a range of different products being labelled or represented as cold brew coffee. This was important, as the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) require product and marketing claims to be “truthful and not misleading.”
Since the FDA does not have any formal definition or Standard of Identity for cold brew coffee, the stakeholders put their heads together and, through much debate, developed a baseline description for cold brew: a product made with roasted coffee grounds and brewed with room temperature or cooler water (NCA Cold Brew Safety Guide for Manufacturers). To avoid limiting future innovation in the cold brew space, the description is relatively broad and serves as a guide, so that operators working with cold brew can develop great-tasting products and feel good knowing they are serving authentic, safe products. Knowing how cold brew is made, prepared, and/or processed also helps identify potential safety risks and determine how it should be regulated.
How cold brew is made
Cold brew is traditionally made by ‘cold brewing’ roasted and ground coffee beans from Coffea arabica (Arabica coffee), or a blend of Arabica and Coffea canephora (Robusta), with filtered water. It can take some trial-and-error to find the right bean blend, roast, and grind that works with a cold brewing process to get a desired taste profile. Brewing water is typically room temperature or cooler, and steeping times for brewing can vary tremendously, from as little as a few minutes to 12 to 18-plus hours overnight. Brewing can be done at a retail shop using a five-gallon, full-immersion method or on an industrial scale in a manufacturing plant. Nowadays, all types of basic to very advanced technologies are available for cold brewing.
Once the cold-brewing step is complete, cold brew coffee can be served immediately at a retail shop or be heat-processed with a cook step and packaged in a container with an air-tight seal at a manufacturing plant. Cold brew can also be distributed in airtight kegs, bottled, or held with nitrogen gas to make nitro cold brew. There are too many bottling, distribution, and serving scenarios to account for here, but having detailed knowledge of how the cold brew is brewed, processed, and/or packaged, held, and served will help determine what food safety risks and regulations might apply to a product and to the operator.
Cold brew coffee can also be manufactured or served with additives like dairy or plant-based milks, spices, and herbs, or formulated with ingredients for functional health, novelty, and taste appeal. Because added ingredients have the capacity to introduce new food safety risks to the equation, this article focuses solely on unsweetened, plain cold brew. A manufacturer/retailer should always work with a food safety and compliance professional who can help oversee and provide guidance on navigating overly complex and nuanced food safety approaches needed for cold brew coffee.
Manufacturing rules
Historically, there have been a few instances of food recalls for manufactured RTD cold brew due to a lack of manufacturers’ awareness over FDA’s food safety and compliance rules. Cold brew that has been brewed and bottled in a manufacturing plant with an air-tight seal, whether as concentrate or single-strength (drinkable strength), needs to be processed with Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs), heat-treated with a cook step, and packaged following FDA’s low-acid food regulations (21 CFR § Part 113). This is done to prevent the pathogen Clostridium botulinum, or C bot for short, from growing and producing toxins that could cause botulism. A manufacturer needs to work with a licensed low-acid food processing authority and have their process filed with the FDA.
Rules for retailers
For retailers, the regulations have been unclear, for several reasons. The FDA publishes the Food Code every few years, which sets a model for the safe handling of food in a retail setting. Federal, state, and local health departments can then decide how to interpret and enforce the Food Code in their own areas. However, health inspectors are often uncertain how to interpret the Food Code, which has created inconsistent enforcement and confusion amongst coffee shop retailers. One challenge for inspectors has been to determine how to regulate cold brew prepared, held, and served at retail, such as when brewing at room temperature for a prolonged time, or holding nitro cold brew in airtight kegs. The Food Code can offer multiple options for enforcement, one of which considers cold brew’s physical and chemical properties, like pH and moisture content.
Cold brew has a pH, or a measure of the acidity or alkalinity of a substance, which is considered low acid. A low acid food can, under certain circumstances, allow pathogens to grow or toxins to form, and cold brew coffee has a lot of moisture, conditions which, in theory, could potentially allow the growth of pathogens.
The Food Code recognises that in instances of a low acid pH and high available moisture content (measured through water activity aw), a food or beverage may be considered a time/temperature control for safety (TCS) food. A TCS food could, as the name implies, require specific holding temperatures and times, or require a heat-cook step.
However, the Food Code also allows that such TCS measures may not be required if certain conditions are met, such as the provision of safety data showing that a food or beverage can be produced safely under the desired conditions. Such safety data can be submitted to the health inspectors in the form of a challenge study or Product Assessment (which are scientific ways of evaluating the safety of a food).
Retailers are fortunate in that plain, unsweetened cold brew lacks nutrients for most organisms to grow, and many industry members would tell you that in their own privately run studies, cold brew seemed to prevent pathogens from growing. While the jury is still out as to what the exact mechanism might be, there seems to be some aspect of cold brew coffee that has antimicrobial properties.
Health inspectors often need to rely on science-based evidence like a challenge study or Product Assessment to determine how pathogens can grow in a food or beverage in order to make risk-based decisions. Recently, the NCA published a challenge study white paper on retail cold brew food safety, which evaluated concentrated cold brew prepared by the full-immersion method and single-strength cold brew packaged in a bag-in-box (which is often then inserted into a chilled dispenser at retail). The cold brew was purposely tested with known amounts of E coli, Salmonella, Listeria, C bot, Bacillus cereus, and Staph. These are different pathogens that are representative of common sources of food-borne illness and infections. The cold brew was stored at 85°F/29°C in conditions with air and no air for up to 11 days. The researchers found that neither pathogenic growth nor toxin formation occurred in the tested cold brew. These findings are crucial to help inform health inspectors on the safety of cold brew – and provide a strong scientific basis to demonstrate the safety of cold brew coffee.
What the future holds
While the research and resources that have been created are important steps for protecting this category, there is more work to be done to make sure that everyone is on the same page.
The NCA is currently working elbow-to-elbow with health inspectors, FDA scientists, and allied industry members with the Conference for Food Protection (CFP) in the Council III, Retail Cold Brew Coffee Safety & Compliance Committee. The committee aims to provide guidance to the CFP and ultimately health inspectors and retailers on how to interpret and enforce the Food Code for safety and compliance of retailers’ cold brew coffee programmes.
By being proactive, retailers, industry stakeholders, and health departments can work collaboratively to determine a common interpretation of the Food Code that most inspectors can get behind and retailers can comply with. Once guidance is developed through the CFP, the information can be shared with retailers and inspectors nationwide, followed by training and education to bring everyone up to speed on serving safe, compliant, and great-tasting cold brew.
- Mark Corey, PhD, joined the NCA as director of scientific and government affairs in February 2018. Previously, he worked in research and development roles in the coffee industry for ten years and was volunteer chairperson of the NCA’s Scientific Leadership Council for five years.
