One day in 1975, after driving around a bit, Eric and Anna Maria found thePiazza di Sant'Eustachio.In the distance, they immediately saw the café they were looking for. Outside the door, a crowd of people were waiting in line to enjoy one of the espressos Mr. Eugenio was preparing. The couple joined in. "It was one of the best coffees we tasted during the trip," Eric recalled 35 years later, at a conference organized by the World Intellectual Property Organization. Taking a sip from that cup changed his life. "The master coffee maker taught me that to make a good espresso, you need to introduce a specific amount of air into the water before it comes into contact with the coffee," he explained to the audience. When he returned to Switzerland, he worked hard to find a convenient and simple system so everyone could make an espresso. quality at home. Today, he's considered one of the fathers of coffee capsules. How did he do it?
By 2024, the invention generated nearly €15 billion in Europe, and it's estimated that by 2029 it will have grown to €20 billion, according to a recent Mordor Intelligence estimates report. Half a century ago, however, no one could have imagined this. Not even Eric Favre. He was a Swiss aerospace engineer who joined the Nestlé Group's packaging division in 1974. At the time, the company's flagship product was Nescafé, its instant coffee. However, consumer trends were changing: people seemed to appreciate roasted coffee again, and a lot. In this context, Favre had convinced his wife, who was Italian, to take him to try what she considered the best Italian coffee shops.
Upon his return to the Nestlé laboratories, he combined his notes with a technology the company had just acquired from the Battelle Institute in Geneva. These were airtight capsules filled with highly roasted coffee that preserved the product's aroma and, when pierced with a special machine, allowed for espresso..The project continued until 1978. "Arthur Fürer, Nestlé's CEO, ordered it stopped for fear that the new product, which still had no name, would threaten Nescafé sales," explain Albert Pfiffner and Hans-Jörg Renk in the corporate bookTransformational challenge: Nestlé 1990-2005.
Eric Favre didn't give up and decided to continue developing capsules and juice-pressing machines on his own. Underhandedly, he managed to persuade Rudolf Tschan, then head of Nestlé in Japan, to give the green light for a market test. It took place in 1984, and, now under the name Nespresso, everything went smoothly. Tschan convinced Camillo Pagano, head of the product department, of the capsules' potential. Pagano spoke about it to Helmut Maucher, Nestlé's longtime CEO. "He had reservations, but in 1986 he created the subsidiary Nespresso SA, appointed Eric Favre to lead it, and assigned him a team of five workers," the authors of the study report.
Maucher believed Nespresso was a revolutionary but niche concept: that it would only be successful among a young, sophisticated audience. He was wrong. By the mid-1990s, capsule sales were growing by 30% to 40% each year, far outpacing Nestlé's other businesses. "The range was expanded, and the Nespresso Club was created, which by 1997 had 200,000 members," he continues.
"They were very good at positioning the product, with advertising focused on selling it as an almost luxury brand," notes Neus Soler, a marketing professor at the UOC. "They also made the right decision by outsourcing the production of the machines to more experienced companies and focusing on the product," she believes.
In the midst of the tsunami, Eric Favre—who held several patents on the technology—jumped ship and founded his own company: Monodoro, now called Mocoffee. With his project, he continued perfecting the invention. By 2010, his company had already produced more than 500 million capsules under license and was determined to become a kind of Tetra Pak, the Swedish company that invented Tetra Brik and manufactures packaging for all types of food.
Nestlé acquires capsule coffee packaging technology from a research institute.
Eric Favre, an engineer at the company, begins work on the project, which he halts for fear of competing with Nescafé.
A product test is carried out in the Japanese market, now under the name Nespresso.
The Nespresso subsidiary is created and sales soar.
Favre leaves Nestlé and founds the current Mocoffee, which markets coffee capsules.
