The Guardian: How Nespresso's coffee revolution got ground down

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. “You are trying to give people visual clues about the origins of the product,” said Spence. “People prefer the taste of things when they think they have made a choice about it.” The Nespresso system made every customer feel like a connoisseur: you had to make a choice every time you put a capsule in the machine, even if it was just between black or purple. [...]

One crucial factor behind Nespresso’s rise, unmentioned by Gaillard, was timing. In 1998, Starbucks arrived in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe from 2001. (Although not in Italy, which somehow held out until 2018.) 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. 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. [...]

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. Nespresso says its global recycling rate is 30%, and that 91% of its users have access to one of its 100,000 collection points around the world. But some experts have suggested that just 5% of Nespresso pods are recycled. Even if Nespresso’s figure is accurate, with a conservative estimate of 14bn capsules being sold each year, and 0.9 grams of aluminium per capsule, that means 12,600 tonnes of Nespresso aluminium end up in landfill annually, enough for 60 Statues of Liberty.

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