Jermaine Marie Ann Fabella-Garcia, Tobias Kretzschmar, Parth Patel, Lei Liu
Coffee ranks among the top five beverages consumed worldwide. Lipids are a key contributor to coffee's organoleptic properties. Lipid content and composition differ between green coffee beans, roasted coffee beans and brewed coffee. Although the lipid content has been well studied, lipid compositional data remain limited mainly to green beans due to the time-consuming conventional method for coffee lipid analysis, making it difficult to trace how lipids change from farm to cup. Recent advances in LC-MS/MS instruments enable the understanding of the whole coffee lipidome by a fast lipidomic analysis. However, some recent lipidomic studies have not reported well-known coffee lipids (e.g. diterpene esters), possibly due to the databases used for lipid search. This review discusses the limitations of the current lipidomic approach and aims to improve this analytical method to understand the changes in lipid composition across various stages of coffee production.