ZURICH, Switzerland —
Nespresso is launching compostable coffee capsules next year in a bid to
fend off competitors trying to muscle in on the lucrative home coffee market
with ever-more eco-friendly alternatives.
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One of Swiss food
giant Nestle’s flagship brands, Nespresso — which makes home coffee machines,
pods, and accessories — will launch paper-based capsules that can be composted
at home “in France and Switzerland in 2023” before spreading out to other
markets in 2024, Nespresso chief executive Guillaume Le Cunff told AFP.
Like the capsules
announced earlier this month by Nescafe Dolce Gusto — another Nestle brand — a
thin film of compostable biopolymer inside the paper seals in the coffee to
keep it fresh.
Le Cunff said the
new Nespresso capsules, which can be used in the brand’s existing machines,
will not replace aluminum pods but rather offer “an alternative” for those who
want to compost their capsules rather than having to take them to recycling
points or back to the shop.
“It’s a complement.
The objective is to offer the choice,” he said.
It took three years
of research to come up with the capsule, with developers going through 28
prototypes.
“We had to create
coffees that work with this packaging. While the engineers were working on the
packaging, our coffee experts were developing new coffees, working on the
roasting and the grinding,” said Le Cunff.
Latte-comers?
With 6.4 billion Swiss francs ($6.45 billion) of sales in 2021, Nespresso
is the second-biggest coffee brand in the world behind stablemate Nescafe, and
the biggest in western Europe, according to market researchers Euromonitor
International.
“Nespresso remains
the leader in the portioned coffee segment. However, there is more
competition,” Jon Cox, an industry analyst with the Kepler Cheuvreux financial
services company, told AFP.
Other firms have
already gone down the compostable route, such as US coffee specialist Keurig.
And in September,
Switzerland’s biggest retailer Migros unveiled 100 percent compostable balls of
compressed coffee covered with a thin film made from algae.
The supermarket
chain launched its CoffeeB pods, which require their own machine, in
Switzerland and in France — one of the largest Nespresso markets — and will
take on the German market next year.
The chain advanced
environmental arguments, claiming that traditional aluminum pods generate
around 100,000 tonnes of waste annually, much of which ends up in the garbage
without being recycled.
Environmentalists watching
Launched in 1986, Nespresso capsules revolutionized coffee consumption in
Europe by making it possible to brew up an espresso at home.
Its success saw
rivals quickly attempt to capitalize, triggering fierce court battles to try to
stop others producing their own capsules that would work in Nespresso machines.
Environmental
organizations are watching the battle for the compostable market with a
cautious eye.
For Florian Kasser,
Greenpeace Switzerland’s consumer and circular economy expert, compostable
alternatives are “a small step forward”.
However, “the
trouble with these innovations is that they give the impression that we can
consume coffee without any environmental problems”, he told AFP.
Kasser said they
were generally going “in the wrong direction”, because like meat or dairy
products, coffee is among the foodstuffs with a “very bad ecological
footprint”, arguing it would be better “to reduce consumption” instead.
Larissa Copello,
from the NGO Zero Waste, said consumers might wrongly infer that “if it
composts in my backyard, then it may degrade in the countryside too”, leading
to littering.
Le Cunff said
Nespresso would form an interest group bringing together public bodies,
companies, NGOs, and waste collectors to raise consumer awareness on
composting.
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