Mondo Knows Facts
Coffee beans are the seeds of a cherry
Each fruit holds two flat seeds that growers strip of skin and sticky mucilage Coffee grows on a shrub that fruits red or yellow cherries, each containing two seeds pressed face to face. The seeds are fermented or washed to remove the mucilage, then dried until their moisture drops to around 11 percent. A single cherry occasionally produces one round seed rather than two, and that lot is sold as peaberry. It sits in Mondo's food collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: coffee, botany, seeds
Coffee beans are the seeds of a cherry: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Each fruit holds two flat seeds that growers strip of skin and sticky mucilage. The figure is taken from Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a food fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Food shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.