Transforming Burundian “taste of place”: From shunned in commercial blends to specialty coffee

Abstract

Human geography has a history of engaging with place-based-quality products through a variety of concepts such as terroir, geographical indicators (GIs), and fictive places. While the efforts necessary to construct a “taste of place” have been explored, it remains unclear how a “taste of place” is established, and by whom. The article explores how relations between quality, products, and places are produced on the ground. More specifically, it addresses the question of what it takes to reconfigure a “taste of place.” Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2017 concerning a coffee producer in Burundi, the article shows how Burundian coffee was reconfigured from an inferior commodity coffee to a sought-after specialty coffee. The findings show that reconfiguring “a taste of place” requires both material and symbolic quality attributes. By underlining the importance of material quality attributes that are place-dependent, it provides a different angle to the discursive approach to “taste of place” in human geography. The author concludes that creating a “taste of place” requires taming space into a consumable representation of place through discursive and material practices.