As the capsule became pressurised with water, the foil would be forced against a spiked plate, bursting it inwards, and out through the spout would run an espresso. Today, some 14bn Nespresso capsules are sold every year, both online and from brightly lit boutiques in 84 countries.
More than Nespressos are drunk every second. Hundreds of rivals and imitators have emerged, some making capsules for Nespresso machines, others pushing competitor systems.
Its success has provided its public face, the actor George Clooney, with the means to maintain a private satellite over Sudan. For a certain kind of business traveller, the sight of a little Nespresso pod in a drawer by the minibar has become as familiar as a Gideon Bible. Buying a machine grants you membership of the Nespresso Club, literally, and also membership of the Nespresso club, metaphorically — a global fellowship of people who care enough about their morning brew to spend 40 or 50p on 5 grams of it, but not enough to spend more than 30 seconds preparing it.
In their homes, the distinctive hum, whirr and clunk of a machine in action has taken its place alongside the churn of a dishwasher. Thirty years after its first successes, Nespresso has scale, experience and buying power that no other premium coffee company can match. The more scrutiny Nespresso has attracted, the tighter it has drawn the curtains. Nespresso also faces mounting criticism over the environmental impact of its pods.
It does not release any figures for how many of its aluminium capsules end up dumped in landfill, rather than recycled. Nespresso triumphed by selling itself as a sophisticated component of an elite, globalised lifestyle. Wherever you were in the world, you could be a Nespresso person, just as you could wear Nike trainers or use American Express. Now, as that lifestyle looks increasingly bankrupt, it is learning to be just another coffee company.
Nespresso helped change the coffee world, but it seems as if the world has moved on. Nespresso argues its coffee has never been better, but the truth is that Nespresso has never really been about the coffee. Looking at the early prototypes on display — elaborate Rube Goldberg-type machines with outsize tanks and pumps and tubes — it is easy to see why it took 10 years after the first patent was filed for the product to come to market. Within the company, though, there were doubters.
This was something different, whatever it was. When Nespresso was finally launched in , it seemed like the sceptics had been right all along. The first models were designed to resemble traditional espresso machines, bigger and clunkier than the sleek designs available today, and only four types of capsule were available, offering various strengths of coffee.
Pitched to businesses in Switzerland and Japan, for offices without enough space for a full-size coffee machine, Nespresso failed to find many takers. Under Gaillard, Nespresso would be transformed from an office coffee company into a luxury brand, the look and feel of which would be as much a part of the product as the beans themselves. He told me he took inspiration from the wine industry.
Where Favre and his team had focused on technical questions — not least how to miniaturise a system that usually took up several feet of bar space and required a skilled operator — Gaillard worried about everything else.
He cut the price of the machines and licensed them to third parties. The first home machines had been made with one firm, Turmix. Later, you could buy a Krupps or Alessi Nespresso machine. These brand associations gave Nespresso familiarity in local markets, and encouraged fancy shops such as Harrods to stock them. Most importantly, he began marketing Nespresso to individual consumers, rather than to businesses, through the new Club Nespresso.
It was no longer just a better coffee for your office — it was a way of life. Over time, Nespresso gained a huge database of customers it could market to, as well as a way of recording consumer preferences and buying habits. For customers, the club created the sense that you were part of a sophisticated worldwide cabal of corporate espresso lovers. When I first encountered Nespresso, as a student, around , I remember feeling like I was finally part of the global elite everyone kept complaining about.
At the University of Oxford, Prof Charles Spence, head of the Crossmodal Research Lab, has studied how much your experience of coffee is shaped by the way it is presented. In Nespresso adverts, he observed, coffee is almost always displayed in a transparent glass, with a crown of light crema on top of the drink.
For the people who sell it, the way coffee looks has long been as important as how it tastes. Until the late 19th century, beans were prized for their size, colour and symmetry. Nespresso applied a similar approach to its capsules: they started rather plain, in greys and golds, but evolved into a full spectrum.
Red means decaffeinated, with darker purples and greys for the stronger, more intense flavours. The story of the tinkerer playing with pipes and valves in his workshop is more appealing than the smooth corporate rebranding exercise. Gaillard is only too glad to correct the record. In his version of the story, Gaillard was a brash operator who made his position unbearable. He described the Favre-centric Nespresso origin story as, at best, a simplification, which omits the work of the many other designers involved.
Nespresso denied the claims. In , Starbucks arrived in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe from Hello can you please update the Vertuo capsules list Nespresso have released some new like barista Creations and Master Origin. Your email address will not be published. Remember me Log in. Lost your password? What exactly are Nespresso Pods?
Nespresso OriginalLine caffeine content. So, how much caffeine in these in a standard Nespresso Pod? Nespresso VertuoLine caffeine content. What about the pour? Espresso vs. The default pour size of Espresso is 40mls The default pour size of Lungo long is mls.
The caffeine range is mg for Espresso and mg for Lungo. So can I make a lungo using a Nespresso espresso capsule? To sum things up. The Green Pods. November 28, at pm Reply. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Search for:. Palermo Kazaar. Envivo Lungo. Fortissio Lungo. Vivalto Lungo. Ristretto Italiano. This little bit of information could change the way you make coffee for the rest of your life and make it so much more enjoyable. It did for me!
I first started using Nespresso over 10 years ago, which replaced instant coffee at work. My initial excitement soon turned to disappointment as I realised the coffee was horrible and even worse than the instant coffee I had been drinking! Each day I forced myself to drink it, while cringing, and shook my head in disbelief at how bad it was. But luckily I am a very inquisitive type of person, so started doing some research and asking colleagues how they were using the machine, in the hope my bad coffee was actually user error and could be improved.
I quickly stumbled across something which shattered my initial assumptions about pod coffee. The intensity is actually more aligned with the taste of the pod. The can be altered by what beans are used, the blend of beans and the type of roast. This was a big development for me as I went back and started trying the lower intensity pods which at the time, I actually enjoyed much more.
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