Nutritional and antioxidant profiling reveals coffee cherry tea as a health-promoting ingredient retaining the nutraceutical properties of coffee husks

The mismanagement of coffee husks, a primary by-product of coffee processing, presents a major sustainability issue to the coffee industry. Valorisation of coffee husks as cherry tea ingredients holds great potential for alleviating this issue. Here, we characterised the nutraceutical properties of coffee husks and cherry tea ingredients prepared from Chinese coffee. Both coffee husks and cherry tea ingredients were found to be rich in dietary fibre and total soluble sugars, whose dry weight percentages were up to 33.33 ± 0.65 and 20.97 ± 0.20, respectively, for coffee husk samples, and 26.90 ± 0.70 and 21.41 ± 0.17 for coffee cherry tea samples. These two types of materials were also both abundant in polyphenols. The highest polyphenol concentrations were 367.4 ± 2.0 and 313.8 ± 3.3 mg gallic acid equivalents per g of sample for husks and cherry tea ingredients, respectively. These results indicate that cherry tea can largely retain the nutraceutical properties of coffee husks. Furthermore, altitude was found to have a strong correlation with antioxidant contents in coffee husks, with R values ranging from 0.86 to 0.96. Our findings validate coffee husks as a source of producing health-promoting ingredients, potentiating further utilisation of this coffee by-product in the food sector. • Cherry tea ingredients largely retain the nutraceutical properties of coffee husks. • Both coffee husks and cherry tea are rich in dietary fibre and total carbohydrates. • Altitude greatly impacts on the antioxidant contents of coffee husks. • Cherry tea presents a sustainable solution to coffee husk utilisation.