Tasting Coffee Through Your Ears and Eyes? New Café de Colombia Campaign Shows You How

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – You can now taste one of the most famous coffees in the world with your ears and eyes as music producers and scientists in Colombia join forces to develop a new sensory experience for coffee drinkers through taste and sound.

The collaboration marks the 60th anniversary of the globally recognized Juan Valdez icon under the Café de Colombia brand – the name given to 100% washed Arabica coffee grown in Colombia.

The 60-year-old image of Juan Valdez continues to stand as a proud symbol of Colombian coffee growers and their dedication to producing the world’s finest coffee.

The Juan Valdez character was created in 1960 to represent Colombian coffee growers and their traditions. The image of Valdez dressed in his traditional attire – a striped poncho and hat – and accompanied by his mule – named Conchita – has proved to be a global sensation.

Music that enhances the taste of your Colombian coffee

Believe it or not, sound can influence your taste buds. And understanding how sound can be used to influence a person’s tasting experience has been the life work of Felipe Reinoso, a researcher at one of Colombia’s top colleges, Universidad de los Andes.

Reinoso has worked for over five years to create these sensory experiences, previously with products like chocolate and beer. But coffee was his most recent challenge.

By figuring out the different elements musicians use to create music, like frequency ranges and different instrument tonality, Reinoso says he was able to understand how the brain associates each one of these elements with flavors, like bitterness, sweetness or acidity.

“How we listen can affect the experience of foods and drinks. Therefore, we can try to understand these associations and try to frame them as congruent or incongruent. By doing this, we are able to create music that most people would tend to frame as a sweet or a bitter type of music,” he said.

For his latest project, the initiative led by Café de Colombia, Reinoso collaborated with music producers Miguel De Narvaez and Juan Fernando Fonseca, to create the song entitled: Colombia coffee, Beyond Taste.

“Together, we created a song integrating natural sounds with real Colombian music, in order to bring for the first time a multisensory tasting experience 100% made in Colombia.”

To produce a song for coffee, the collaborators said that high notes were important as they evoke a sense of sweetness – a well-known characteristic of Colombian coffee – but that the bitter tastes are represented with low frequency and electronic sounds.

Reinoso says that coffee – a product that is delicate and rich in flavor – should be a moment to savor. Something, he says, gets lost in noisy, urban settings. The researcher found ways to improve the experience of those living in big cities, through the use of headphones with special noise control.

“We brought the scientific layer of knowledge on top of this music, and we created a kind of sensory journey through music. It means that when people taste Colombian coffee, they have the opportunity to fully experience this particular section of the music that was created to trigger sweet sensations, bitter sensations and the kind of aroma explosion of coffee,” he said.

Colombian coffee in the world

Cafe de Colombia is the name given to 100% washed Arabica coffee grown in the coffee regions of Colombia. It is also the brand the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC) created to promote their coffees both in the industry and among consumers as a high-quality product.

The FNC is a non-profit organization and since 1927 has established itself as the largest rural NGO in the world that represents more than 540,000 Colombian coffee growing families.

“Colombian Coffee has been for decades a benchmark of quality in the world. What we seek is to take our customers to the next level of a different experience, where we involve other senses,” said Natalia Valencia, the Marketing Director for Café de Colombia.

“That’s why we have decided to release this song so all our consumers will be able to enjoy it and intensify the experience of tasting the richest coffee in the world.”

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