Coffee pods – status symbol or swizz?

Around now, Nespresso machines start winking at shoppers in department stores. ‘Go on,’ they say, with their sleek packaging. ‘You like coffee. You fancy George Clooney. Your husband or wife fancies George Clooney. I am expensive enough to count as a generous gift. Give me a new home.’

For many years it was persuasive, which is why Nespressos have percolated steadily through the population. But the caffeine-thirsty devil has increasingly been out-argued by the eco-angel on the other shoulder, who bangs on about aluminium waste. Since the patents on the company’s original machines expired in 2013, Nespresso owners have increasingly eschewed the official capsules in favour of third-party alternatives. Some are simply cheaper, others boast their superior environmental credentials.

The most alluring are ‘compostable’ capsules. Self-respecting middle-class customers love the sound of ‘compostable’. It allows them to be ecofriendly, which they like, but also lazy, which they like even more. It draws a line from a Swiss megacorp with a history of dodgy ethical practices to their allotment. Nespresso has always insisted that these rivals make inferior capsules and that recycling their own pods is the best thing to do. They go to great lengths to make it possible, short of walking into your kitchen and taking the capsules out of the bin for you.

They would say that: their whole business is selling the pods, rather than the machines. Not everyone can be bothered with the faff of recycling the pods, which are still too small to go in council recycling boxes. The alternative capsules have proliferated. Almost all are biodegradable or compostable, some are ‘reusable’, where you put ground coffee into a washable metal capsule, but these create so much faff and mess you might as well open a coffee shop.

Finally Nespresso has caved. Their own athome compostable capsules will be available next year. It is the latest twist in the tale for a business that has always struggled to understand its customers. Once upon a time, Nespresso were revolutionaries. As an offshoot of Nestlé, they invented a new way of making coffee at home. Most of us didn’t become aware of them until the noughties, but Eric Favre came up with the idea in 1975. After that the system spent a decade in development before it came to market. It was a failure at first. It wasn’t until a marketing guru called Jean-paul Gaillard took over that the company took off. He understood his customers were buying a lifestyle. You didn’t want a Nespresso machine in the kitchen as much as you wanted to be the kind of person who had one, whirring and clunking away at the end of your dinner parties. Clooney was a stroke of genius in this regard.

The company likes to bang on about the freshness and flavour of its beans. But most of us aren’t coffee experts. The lifestyle polish around Nespresso is vital because it helps disguise the truth, which is that its customers are bone-idle, cheapskate drug addicts. All I want in the morning is to come down, semi-conscious, children clinging to each arm like monkeys on windscreen wipers, push a button and have the machine deliver the wake-up juice. I don’t care if the beans went to grammar school. But nor do I want to come across like some kind of ecoterrorist, adding my capsules to the enormous capsule mountain. For those who don’t want to degrade themselves, ‘compostable’ is the magic bullet. Nespresso has finally realised this, but it may be too little, too late.