Where is nespresso made

For more than 30 years, our innovations have redefined the way millions of people enjoy their coffee, growing from a ground-breaking idea in Switzerland to a global brand with a presence in 82 countries. Yes, we continue to grow and are still relentless in our focus on delivering sustainable quality at every stage of our value chain while at the same time maintaining a direct privileged relationship with our customers.

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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 Although not in Italy, which somehow held out until Previously it had been difficult to get a decent coffee anywhere outside Italy.

At Starbucks, you could enjoy Italian-style coffee, which is to say freshly made and with frothy milk, marketed with Italian-style language. The first Nespresso e-commerce site opened in , and the first boutique opened in Even before George Clooney came along, the pot was bubbling nicely.

Rich, very rich. He has said he spends most of it on the satellite he uses to monitor human rights abuses. I drink it every day. Pretty much everyone agrees that bringing Clooney on board was a masterstroke — except Gaillard. In Switzerland, Nespresso took business from roast and ground; in China, from tea; in Britain, from instant. Nespresso reigned supreme over an entire domain of coffee that it had effectively created from scratch.

As Nespresso kept growing, its pursuit of global homogeneity rubbed up against idiosyncratic national or regional coffee cultures. The beans are roasted, ground and put into capsules, between 5 and 6 grams of coffee and 1 gram of aluminium per capsule. On its long journey to the back of your throat, Nespresso coffee is checked for quality more than 40 times, using colour spectrometers and a battery of tasters in white coats.

In some cases, there is DNA analysis. After the capsules have been packaged, they are sorted by robots and sent by train to Antwerp. From there, they are shippedto countries all over the world. The Nespresso system also sat uneasily in a coffee culture that prefers to drink coffee in enormous cups, ideally while driving.

This is the land of the Starbucks venti. People are used to getting a 16oz or even a 20oz coffee. In a bid to crack the US, Nespresso introduced a whole new range of machines — the Vertuo system, capable of delivering much larger portions. In , it finally signed up Clooney to a North American deal; until then he had only been the face of the firm in the rest of the world.

But eventually, would-be competitors spotted an opportunity to exploit the niche that Nespresso had created. In , Gaillard launched the Ethical Coffee Company, which sold biodegradable capsules for Nespresso machines. In , the American firm Sara Lee started to sell capsules that worked in Nespresso machines.

Nespresso furiously litigated against its rivals, arguing that its patent systems were being infringed. Things came to a head in , when a key batch of Nespresso patents from were set to expire. Green campaigners, however, have been critical of the rapid adoption of the coffee capsule, criticising the deluge of waste streaming from the pod-powered coffee makers.

According to research by Halo, a British producer of compostable coffee capsules, every minute about 39, of these pods are made worldwide, while up to 29, are dumped in landfill sites. Alf Hill, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Bath, looked at all the stages of coffee production, from growing the beans to disposal of waste, assessing the impact on ecosystems, climate change, and water. His team found that instant coffee comes out best, but that capsules are the runner up in the environmental impact stakes.

Filter or drip coffee comes third, while traditional espresso has the worst environmental impact. Hill's research backs up other studies conducted during the past few years, which suggest that capsules are environmentally less harmful than alternative coffee-brewing methods.

Aside from the environmental impact of growing beans in the first place, the second biggest hit is the energy it takes to brew coffee. Capsules, on the other hand, are more efficient. The coffee machines only flash-heat the amount of water needed for one portion, unlike, for example, boiling a kettle. Sebastien Humbert, an expert in life-cycle assessment studies at Quantis, a company that works with many organisations to improve their sustainability, cautions that if you take a responsible consumer — not an average consumer — then it is possible to make drip-filter coffee with less negative impact than capsules, albeit just ever so slightly.

People are just focussing on how capsules are killing the planet. A study by Quantis compared the electricity consumption during brewing, heating and wasting coffee for single-serve and drip coffee preparation. It found that single-serve coffee uses an exact serving of fresh coffee, which cuts coffee waste, while people making drip coffee often have leftover that they throw away. And espresso makers that sit on a gas hob or a hot plate use significantly more energy than a capsule machine does.

Research by KTH in Stockholm, meanwhile, found that filter coffee has the worst environmental impact, because cup for cup, filter coffee uses more beans to prepare a single cup — about seven grams, compared to 5. Add that up to billions of cups of coffee drunk around the world each year and it quickly creates huge increase of the amount of coffee beans that have to be grown, harvested, processed and transported, plus all the energy needed to heat the water when making the cup.

They started chatting about how the composition of water affects the taste of coffee; the discussion led he pair to first co-author a paper in the Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry and later a book, Water for Coffee. Last year, Colonna-Dashwood decided to talk to Bath scientists again. He approached Hill at the chemical engineering department and asked him to find out which capsules are actually best: aluminium, plastic or compostable.