Also called: Coffee Cupper, Green Coffee Buyer
Professionally tastes and scores coffee quality for importers, roasters, and farms.
You slurp dozens of coffees from spoons, scoring each on sweetness, acidity, and defects to decide what to buy. Green coffee buyers travel to farms in Colombia, Ethiopia, or Guatemala during harvest. Becoming a licensed Q Grader takes a famously hard week of exams.
Buyers at large importers earn the most.
Approximate: anchored on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for a broader job group.
Certificate, about 1 year after high school. Coffee Quality Institute Q Grader license plus experience.
Ways in: Certification, On-the-job training. Training cost: Under $15k.
Growing about average.
Low risk for 10 years. Sensors help measure coffee, but licensed human tasters still score quality for the market.
Classes: Chemistry, Biology, Spanish.
Career Universe is an early version. Pay, training and AI-risk figures are estimates to start your own research, not verified facts. The research was written with AI research assistants, checked by validation scripts and spot-checked by hand. Check anything important with schools, employers and official sources. How the numbers work.