Rewriting the Rules: Dr. Mandappa and the Coffee Board

The Scientist Who Almost Went to Ireland

Mandappa grew up in Mysore with his grandmother and aunt, packed off for better schooling while the estate carried on without him. He found his way into science, all the way through a master's in microbiology and then a PhD in biotechnology at CFTRI.

His first brush with research came during his master's, when a dissertation stint at CFTRI caught the attention of a scientist there, who called him back as a project assistant. His project focused on environmental contaminants: lead, arsenic, cadmium, and how to detect them. What made it distinctive was the method. Rather than raising antibodies in rats or rabbits, as most researchers did, he isolated them from egg yolk, being one of the few to adopt a non-invasive, quieter approach.

His PhD took that curiosity further, centring on a toxin produced by Bacillus cereus that affects rice-based products. The goal was practical: develop detection kits that could be used on-site, at the source, without needing a full laboratory. A simple yes or no, wherever the farmer stood.

"It was frustrating at times," he admits. "You wonder what you're doing when all your friends are already reaching high positions. It gets a little taxing."

But he went through it, with the unwavering support of his family. And he enjoyed it.

Coffee, at this point, was the furthest thing from his mind.

After submitting his thesis, a postdoctoral fellowship in Ireland was within reach: funded research, room to go further. He was deep in that plan when a junior colleague at CFTRI walked past his worktable, noticed a printed application form sitting completely untouched, and posted it without telling him.

"She told me the next day. 'I saw something lying on your table. I know you're not bothered, so I posted it.'"

The form was for a position at the Coffee Board of India. A year later, with nobody having given the application any thought, a call came in. He had been shortlisted.

The Test and the Decision

Out of roughly a thousand applications, 98 candidates were shortlisted based on their publications, qualifications, and academic scores. They were called in for a fifteen-minute sensory test: no coffee involved, no industry knowledge required, just the raw machinery of a taster put to work. Arrange five cups of solution in ascending order of intensity, then descending. Pick the odd cup among three by taste alone. Identify unlabelled fragrances: clove, cinnamon, pineapple, something floral. Name the five basic tastes. Hand it in. Go back and wait.

Mandappa had not walked in entirely unprepared, though not as prepared as most candidates were. He had no formal sensory training. What he had was his grandmother and mother’s upbringing, who, having been fantastic cooks, had spent years filling a kitchen with aromas he had learned, without realising it, to identify and name.

"Thanks to my grandma and mother’s cooking skills," he says, "I was able to pick up these things."

It was not science. It was something older and harder to teach.

Out of roughly 1,000 applications, 19 cleared the threshold. Mandappa was one of them.

The interview that followed drew on everything his CFTRI years had built into him: those quarterly presentations in front of the full faculty, every assumption interrogated, every number questioned, until the stage fright had been replaced by something more durable.

"Once you know your subject," he says confidently, "there's nothing to be scared of."

And yet, even with the offer in hand, he was genuinely torn. The Irish fellowship was still alive. He gave himself four days to decide and spent them on the river, fishing, far from the noise of everyone else's opinions. A research career pulling in one direction, coffee, Coorg, and his family’s beautiful farm pulling in the other. Four days of sitting with a question that no spreadsheet was going to answer.

He chose the Coffee Board. Not because the other path had closed, but because this one felt like it mattered in a specific, personal way that he couldn't quite argue away.

"Let me see if I can make a difference to the sector," he said when he joined. "Let me see where it goes."

Learning Everything, Starting From the Bottom

Mandappa joined in 2016 as one of four Subject Matter Specialists, the first permanent team assembled around Dr Basavaraj, who had held the quality division together largely alone for years.

The team wasted no time. Almost immediately after joining, they wrote a comprehensive infrastructure proposal to their ministry under the TIES scheme - Trade Infrastructure for Export Certification, pitching a complete rebuild of the laboratory. Two years of advocacy later, with CEO Srivatsa Krishna pushing it through, the funding arrived. The laboratory was rebuilt from the ground up: gas chromatographs, liquid chromatographs, pesticide and heavy metal testing, an E-nose, and an E-tongue for chemical profiling. Every machine required hundreds of pages of justification to survive the government tendering process and avoid being forced into the cheapest option. They successfully justified each decision and got what they wanted.

In 2019, the team turned its attention to something far more complex. Six Geographical Indication tags for six distinct Indian regional coffees, secured in a single application round. It meant assembling documentation, proving geographic specificity, and defending each tag before the GI Registry in Chennai. Six at once. "Unheard of," Mandappa says simply.

The GIs now sit as legal entities, held by the Coffee Board and extended to producer associations. India's formal acknowledgement that its coffee is not one product but many, each tied to a specific landscape and tradition.

None of it happened from behind a desk. In those early years, Mandappa was doing everything that came his way: managing the analytical lab, sitting on the Bureau of Indian Standards committee, and reviewing and writing technical norms. The work that built the foundation and gave him something no title could: a complete view of how the system worked, from every angle. That, combined with the scientific rigour his PhD had instilled in him, the ability to ask precise questions and follow the evidence, translated surprisingly well into the business of building an institution. And when the division needed a leader, he was ready.

As Divisional Head of the Coffee Quality division at the Coffee Board of India, Mandappa took charge officially in August 2022. Not long after taking over, the division earned NABL accreditation not just for chemical testing, as most labs certify, but also for sensory analysis. For the act of tasting and grading coffee by a trained human being. Three years running. One of the only labs in India to hold that distinction.

"It is a team effort," he says. "I push them hard, and the credit belongs to all of us."

When the stakeholders flagged a national shortage of skilled baristas, the previous CEO, Dr K.G. Jagadeesha and Dr Mandappa brainstormed for hours. The result was the Board's first private partnership for barista training - a model now standard across Coffee Board events, with over a thousand baristas certified.

"Our intention was to train baristas who could cater to the industry," he says. "It so happened that café owners came too, saying if we don't learn, how do we know."

The scarcity of skilled baristas in the country has not yet been fully resolved, but the programme has built something broader than it set out to: a growing community of people who understand coffee seriously, on both sides of the counter.

All of this, the lab, the training, the certifications, points to something Mandappa has been deliberate about from the start. He never wanted to run just another government laboratory. When he arrived, the Coffee Board's quality division had a small analytical lab built primarily for ochratoxin testing. What it has become is something the industry can actually use. A facility that tests pesticide residues, heavy metals, and chemical profiles. That runs sensory evaluations to an internationally accredited standard and trains the next generation of processing and cupping professionals.

"In this day and age, you have to be further ahead of the curve," he says.

And being ahead of the curve, for Mandappa, means more than equipment and certifications. It means changing how the division relates to the people it serves. It is a culture deliberately built to make the system accessible, where stakeholders feel confident engaging without hesitation.

“Show your interest and participation voluntarily. You will get our backing. If you come with a problem and a partial solution, we can do wonders.”

What the Cup Knows Before Anyone Checks

His team cups thousands of samples a year: commercial batches, competition entries, research samples. The work is relentless, and the stakes are real. A score can shift a grower's pricing, a buyer's decision, an entire season's return. And yet Mandappa keeps returning to the table not out of duty but out of something closer to his heart.

"When I’m bogged down with mundane work," he says, "I go to the table, and I cut off from everything. You're not judging the coffee. You're trying to see what's good in it."

It is that same depth of practice, thousands of cups across hundreds of origins over nearly a decade, that turns the cupping table into something closer to a sixth sense. He and Ramya, along with their colleagues and fellow cuppers, sometimes make a quiet game of it, calling out estates, regions, and varieties from blind samples. Around 85 to 90 per cent of the time, they are right.

"You call it subjective," he says, "but there is still something to it. I can't explain it. But it's there."

A grower from Coorg came in once with his estate manager, puzzled by what the feedback scorecard was telling them. Mandappa studied it carefully, then looked up. Were the plants young, he asked? The manager shook his head. One block was young, he said, but the rest were old and established. Mandappa didn't hesitate. It was nutrition then. Not enough fertiliser. The body of the coffee wasn't holding up, and the aftertaste wasn't developing the way elevation should naturally produce.

The manager went back to the estate, checked, and confirmed it. One full round of fertiliser had been skipped entirely. The cup had registered the deficit before anyone on the farm had thought to look for it.

"How do I explain that?" Mandappa says. "How do you call that subjective?"

He sits with the question rather than dismissing it. Cupping is subjective; he does not pretend otherwise. But calibrated subjectivity, trained and exercised across thousands of cups with scientific backing, is not the same as guesswork. The Coffee Board uses its own hybrid scorecard, drawing on SCA methodology and elements of the newer CVA system, with a scale that ranges from 0 to 10 rather than SCA's 6 to 10. An 80 on the Coffee Board scorecard is not an 80 on an SCA cupping scorecard. He is precise about this and insistent.

"If you don't want to, then don't use the coffee board cupping score card to project it to a buyer. This is feedback for you."

As for those who argue that machines will eventually make tasters like him redundant, he has a simple answer. The same chemical compound that registers as floral in one concentration reads as faecal in another. A gas chromatograph will name the molecule with complete accuracy. What it cannot do is tell you which experience you are having. That still requires a human being, standing at a table, paying attention.

"I'm not scared at all that they say cuppers are going out of fashion," he says. "I still don't believe it."

From Regulator to Facilitator

There is a line Mandappa returns to often when describing how the Coffee Board has been changing since the late 90s.

"We are now a facilitator from a regulator. Initiatives that build quality from the farm level to the cup."

It sounds like a policy statement. What sits behind it is something more personal.

His own father, a grower in Coorg, had never once entered the Flavour of India Fine Cup Award, the Board's flagship annual quality competition. When Mandappa asked why, the answer was disarmingly simple.

"He said, 'Who am I? I'm a small grower. The big players will automatically win.'"

That one sentence became the brief for the Know Your Kaapi, KYK, campaign. Seven categories across Arabica, Robusta, experimental processing, and an alternate-species category for Excelsa and other varieties that growers were quietly cultivating. Samples arrive blind, coded entirely by software. What made it genuinely different was the specific feedback given to every participant after the cupping. The notes were granular and honest, pointing to immature beans, uneven drying, or a fermentation step that had likely failed at a specific stage. Observations small enough to act on, and precise enough to make a difference.

"When you go back and cross-check your process, you'll know where you went wrong."

The tagline was simple and quietly radical: Know your Kaapi. Let the cup speak.

The team took inspiration from Dr Jagdeesh’s words,

“Be proud of your own produce, a grower should take pride in their own produce and only then will the coffee go ahead”.

Running alongside the feedback mission is a quieter one. Every sample cupped through KYK is simultaneously fed through the E-nose and E-tongue, building a dataset that Mandappa hopes will eventually produce the first regional flavour profiles for Indian coffee: the ability to say, with evidence and consistency, that this belt produces coffee with these characters.

"We've gotten somewhere," he says carefully. "But we're not yet there."

The first KYK award was presented at the World Coffee Conference in 2023. A tribal grower from the Koraput region won one of the categories. Mandappa says simply: "It was so nice to see the shift."

The India International Coffee Festival grew from the same partnership model: the Coffee Board providing technical credibility and running competitions, while private partners handle the organisation. The goal is a place in the global coffee calendar.

"It should be like the World of Coffee," Mandappa says. "We want people to plan around it."

The logic running underneath it all is the same.

"Give everybody a piece of the pie. You won't lose out. Don't grab the whole thing. You won't grow as a sector."

The Next Bet: Coffee Growing From the Inside Out

The project Mandappa is most energised by right now does not yet fully exist, but the thinking behind it is completely formed. He calls it the CCQC: Community Coffee Quality Centres. Small-scale processing and cupping hubs are embedded within farmer-producer organisations across India's growing regions. A wet mill, a mini dry mill, a cupping area, and a training space. Two acres. Nothing elaborate, everything functional.

The inspiration came from what was built for tribal growers in the Araku region: community processing units handed over to local FPOs, who now run them independently. Mandappa took that model and asked what it would look like if the Coffee Board built it into the fabric of the industry, systematically, as a programme rather than a one-off.

Coffee Board provides infrastructure, training, and technical support. Land comes from the FPO or the institution; the onus remains local. Within each centre, local people are trained progressively, moving through cupping levels until they qualify for Q grading at the Board's expense. Local Q processors certified in-house, placed back inside their own communities.

"Even if they leave," Mandappa says, "there is still a qualified quality specialist in that community who can help somebody else."

The hub-and-spoke logic is deliberate. The Board's central lab remains the hub, checking and cross-verifying, while the community centres operate as spokes, accountable to their own FPOs but connected to a national standard.

"There has to be something to keep you going," he says.

Several FPOs have already voiced interest. Funding is being sought. The idea is ready even if the infrastructure isn't yet.

The Estate, the River, What Remains

After a decade of making things work inside a system, the place that started it all quietly carries on. Back home, the family estate still has no tractor capable of descending the slope. But around ninety percent of its coffee now qualifies as specialty. The naturals go to roasters who return every season without being chased. The red honey has one buyer who wants nothing else. Every picking season, he spends at least one night on the estate. Just him, his father, and his brother. The same way they always have.

"I think we are the last generation that had that mix of hardcore country life with a life of comfort," he says. "These memories have made us more grounded.“

His grandfather built the curing works and bought the farm. His parents kept it alive through the years when nobody was watching. And Mandappa, the scientist who almost went to Ireland, cups the coffee, traces its character back to its soil, and has spent a decade opening doors for growers who assumed those doors weren't meant for them.

"Nobody is small. Nobody is big. Everybody can make it as long as their practices are correct," he says.

"The cups will speak."

They already are.