Nespresso reigned supreme over an entire domain of coffee that it had effectively created from scratch. Nespresso furiously litigated against its rivals, arguing that its patent systems were being infringed. Name a better-chosen advertising figurehead than Nespresso's George Clooney. Most caffeine-deprived coffee -loving humans would go considerably out of their way for the perfect cup—and George Clooney is no exception. t Nestlé headquarters in Vevey, there is a small museum dedicated to the history of Nespresso. Sustainability in coffee is complex. The “Gravity” actor told the Guardian that he’s spending “most” of the cash he earns from appearing in commercials for Nespresso on a spy satellite aimed at Sudan. Mining a tonne of aluminium can produce about 10-12 tonnes of waste, including 2-3 tonnes of toxic alkaline red mud. “If Nespresso had been a startup from Silicon Valley, everyone would be hailing them,” says Rory Sutherland, the vice-chair of the advertising agency Ogilvy, who owns three Nespresso machines. But still, to this day, in the US Nespresso exists in the long, dark shadow of the K-Cup. You might remember Rio Tinto from such edifying corporate stories as “accepting bribes in China”, “corruption allegations in Guinea” and “the Norwegian government concluding that Tinto were ‘directly involved’ in ‘severe environmental damage’ through a mine in Indonesia”. He told me that his invention didn’t make him rich, but that didn’t bother him. Nespresso is committed to having a positive impact on the environment, farmers, consumers and society at large. “In many ways, the Nespresso pod is the microwave meal of coffee,” said James Hoffman. These days there are more than 400 competitor capsules. Successful products can look inevitable in hindsight, but the gap in the market wasn’t obvious. The first home machines had been made with one firm, Turmix. In a bid to crack the US, Nespresso introduced a whole new range of machines – the Vertuo system, capable of delivering much larger portions. Colleagues feared that if Favre’s invention succeeded it would cannibalise the company’s existing coffee businesses, especially the flagship Nescafé instant brand. Clooney’s public image – sophisticated, cosmopolitan, expensive – fitted Nespresso’s desired image. Tailored to match your consumption. George Clooney 'saddened' by child labour at farms 'used by Nespresso' The Oscar-winning filmmaker has for years been the face of the company, which advertises its products as being ethically sourced. Nespresso argues its coffee has never been better, but the truth is that Nespresso has never really been about the coffee. The story of the tinkerer playing with pipes and valves in his workshop is more appealing than the smooth corporate rebranding exercise. and GET MORE +10% extra credit and FREE Delivery - Subscription offer valid until 17.09.2021 - Footer S U STAINABLE. Over shots of farmers and waterfalls and thoughtful-looking agronomists, a female voice talks about ecosystems, farmers and recyclable aluminium. George Clooney — American actor, screenwriter, producer, director and activist — is extending his relationship with Nespresso by becoming the new brand ambassador in the U.S. and Canada. “Gaillard is un diable,” Favre told me. “I wanted to create the Chanel of coffee, and decided to keep it chic and bobo,” he said in a 2010 interview. We'll wait. Talk to senior executives involved at the time, and it’s clear the rulings were traumatic for the company. 4. (Nespresso denied the claims. One major market has largely held out against Nespresso’s global conquest: the US. “But people enjoy the bullshit.”, 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. If a tie-in between an Anglo-Australian mining conglomerate with a history of scandals and a secretive Nestlé-owned coffee company doesn’t calm the doubters, what will? Nespresso brand ambassador, Paying Premiums for the Highest Quality Coffee. In an attempt to go slightly more green, Nespresso is now working with the commodities giant Rio Tinto to use only “sustainable aluminium”. He also claimed that the original idea for Nespresso came not from within Nestlé but from a research organisation, the Battelle Institute, which Gaillard said sold the idea to Nestlé in 1973. The following year, 1976, Nestlé filed its first patent for a single-serve coffee system. But as that coffee tends to come from large farms growing cheaper beans, it can be a worse deal for farmers, and encourage types of farming that have a bigger impact on the environment. “With their competitive advantage, they could be a model of sustainability, leading the circular economy,” she said. Within the company, though, there were doubters. 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. “But once you lose your way, the competition makes it really scary.”. lthough Nespresso’s rise can be told in part as a triumph of branding, it also depended on a smart approach to patenting and design. The animosity between Gaillard and Nestlé lingers. In 1998, Starbucks arrived in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe from 2001. This is the land of the Starbucks venti. Pitched to businesses in Switzerland and Japan, for offices without enough space for a full-size coffee machine, Nespresso failed to find many takers. Favre returned to Switzerland and, along with a small team, set about designing a machine that could replicate this procedure. Today, some 14bn Nespresso capsules are sold every year, both online and from 810 brightly lit boutiques in 84 countries. At the time, Nestlé saw itself as a mass market company that sold cheap, reliable products: chocolate and baby food and cereal. George Clooney is reported to have earned an estimated $40 million as Nespresso’s brand ambassador. For years, that model underpinned Nespresso’s global growth. Nespresso’s factories are gleaming temples to globalisation. Sitting at a tasting table, we sniffed, slurped and spat out a variety of different brews. More than 400 Nespressos are drunk every second. “My name is forbidden at Nestlé,” Gaillard said, noting that there is no mention of him anywhere on the company website. Most importantly, he began marketing Nespresso to individual consumers, rather than to businesses, through the new Club Nespresso. The idea was to keep it to “the level of people who have a doorman”. Its range of capsules offered the sense of choice, but in reality it was just one option: Nespresso. For customers, the club created the sense that you were part of a sophisticated worldwide cabal of corporate espresso lovers. In the history of at-home premium coffee, this is perhaps the closest anyone has ever come to a eureka moment. Like other high-street businesses, Nespresso has been buffeted by months of coronavirus closure. The first Nespresso e-commerce site opened in 1998, and the first boutique opened in 2000. A new CEO, Guillaume Le Cunff, another long-term employee, who had previously worked on many of the company’s sustainability initiatives, took over earlier this year. In its heyday, Nespresso fit a story consumers were keen to tell themselves: that for a small premium, quality could be guaranteed, whether you were in Tokyo, Geneva or Los Angeles. Favre’s aim was to build a world in which espresso was available at home. “I’ve been working with Nespresso internationally for nine years and I really love and respect the brand, what they do, and how they do it,” said George Clooney. According to the historian of consumption, Jonathan Morris, Nespresso capitalised on these new tastes: “When customers started to ask how they could have [Starbucks-style coffee] at home, Nespresso was the best-placed product to take advantage of that.” Between its Fortissio and Vivalto pods, it had the cod-Italian ready to go, too. Or there was soluble instant coffee, which was quick and easy but had an unsubtle flavour. 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. In 2006, its revenues passed £500m. Lots of the carbon cost is in transport, so by some measures, the most efficient use of beans is instant coffee, where only a small amount of coffee is used per cup. Gaillard also overhauled the capsules, reducing the aluminium content and putting up the price by 50%. “Favre was a technician. Favre had recently started working at Nestlé’s headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland, and one of his first projects was to develop a machine that would combine the convenience of domestic coffee with the quality of an Italian espresso bar, where customers paid more for a product made by an expert using large, expensive equipment. In the 16th century, the governor of Mecca feared it would encourage his citizens to overthrow him. Later, you could buy a Krupps or Alessi Nespresso machine. One of Gaillard’s innovations was to rebalance the business towards making revenue from the capsules rather than the machines. Nespresso triumphed by selling itself as a sophisticated component of an elite, globalised lifestyle. Now there are alternatives for every taste. Jean-Marc Duvoisin became CEO in 2013, and was charged with taking Nespresso to a new era, leaving the patent disputes behind. It’s fine in terms of its quality, but with a little bit of effort you could make something far better at home.” But as Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood, who runs an independent coffee shop in Bath, told me, Nespresso was never meant to rival true specialty coffee. Please email ukyocrcpromotion@nespresso.com with the subject line ‘Valentine’s Promotion 2021’ including the following information: 1. When Nespresso was finally launched in 1986, it seemed like the sceptics had been right all along. (It does not release any figures for how many of its aluminium capsules end up dumped in landfill, rather than recycled.) More recently, the company’s reputation was further damaged when the Channel 4 documentary series Dispatches found children under 13 working 40-hour weeks on farms that supplied coffee to Nespresso and Starbucks. She is mine, she is in my heart, she is always in my mind.”. Its success has provided its public face, the actor George Clooney, with the means to maintain a private satellite over Sudan. But until Nespresso pods can be included in household recycling, the figures on reuse are unlikely to improve. Its success has provided its public face, the actor George Clooney, with the means to maintain a private satellite over Sudan. George Clooney is spending a recent handsome paycheck on an endeavor that might surprise those who know more about Clooney’s love life than his espionage activities. When asked to clarify Favre and Gaillard’s involvement, it replied with a generic history that mentioned no individuals.). “It was a major mistake,” he told me. 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. Unlike plastic, used by many of Nespresso’s rivals, aluminium is 100% recyclable, but there is a big difference between offering recycling facilities and getting consumers to use them. He described the Favre-centric Nespresso origin story as, at best, a simplification, which omits the work of the many other designers involved. (Although roast coffee can stay fresh for weeks, ground coffee loses its freshness after about half an hour.) That year, Nespresso lost its patent battles in Germany and England, and settled other outstanding cases around Europe. 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. When I first encountered Nespresso, as a student, around 2006, I remember feeling like I was finally part of the global elite everyone kept complaining about. “Probably. “I see Nespresso like a daughter who is always telling me: look at what you can do and look at what you did. Until the late 19th century, beans were prized for their size, colour and symmetry. A photo of a valid receipt showing date and place of purchase of the machine. n Clooney’s first ad for Nespresso, which aired in 2006, he wanders into a Nespresso boutique and starts making himself a cup of coffee. Rich, very rich.” Clooney: “You’re talking about the Nespresso, right?” They look at him. “Favre is one of those people who pop up in history and do great things,” Marco Restelli, Nespresso’s head of product and development, told me at Nespresso’s offices in Lausanne. A report published in 1974, titled The Baby Killer, showed how Nestlé aggressively promoted formula milk over breastfeeding in poor countries, where clean water was hard to come by. At the dawn of the 17th century, Pope Clement VIII declared it to be “the devil’s drink”. In 1975, a young engineer named Eric Favre took a trip to Rome that would change the history of coffee. Nestlé had ploughed a decade of investment into a system that got people to pay five times more for coffee at home than for traditional roast and ground: why not try to piggyback on that? 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. 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. “We are pleased to extend the relationship with him to North America and bring our brand story and high quality, sustainable coffee to more and more people,” said Alfonso Gonzalez, Nespresso Chief Customer Officer. Nespresso once wooed coffee lovers with its ease of use, and instant coffee drinkers with better coffee. “It’s about waste measurement and transparency. Beginning on November 2nd, George Clooney will be featured in Nespresso’s new integrated marketing campaign in North America, which brings to life Nespresso as â€œa cup above”, across television, print and digital advertisements, a partnership web film, social media and a dedicated microsite. People are used to getting a 16oz or even a 20oz coffee.”. (“When I was there we had the highest percentage [profit] margin in Nestlé,” Gaillard told me. 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