I will answer this question for you very soon.
For the first time in my life, the pros of actually writing for something like a food blog manifested in some nice PR people offering me the opportunity to test the Nespresso Latissima machine at home for a couple of weeks. As I taste and research coffee for a living (it’s true!), I have been curious about these machines for a while. The race-car-sleek machines Nespresso is making are designed to seduce the gadget-happy. I’ve seen their flagship store on Champs Elysees, and the line halfway around the block to get hold of the capsules.
Before I even opened the package that arrived at my door, I tried to find out how much the coffee costs. And yes, you can only use the Nespresso produced capsules, and no, I could not for my bare life figure out the price. However, once the machine arrived, everything was pretty much plug and play – it comes with a start-up package of 16 capsules, so you have some time to figure out how to get more. No grinding involved, no spill and no complicated mounting of spouts and tuning of volumes.
The machine promises espressos of 40ml, so the first thing I wanted to see was if it is consistent. It is fairly consistent, although some shots were around 44-46ml. More consistent than most home baristas? Yes, definitely. In addition to be a no brainer to set up, the procedure for making coffee is pretty much “press and out comes the coffee”. It is practically spill-free – no grounds anywhere, no coffee dripping. It heats super fast – it took the machine only 55 seconds to heat up – and the temperature seems stable. The espressos I brewed were brewing in 12 – 17 seconds, with a temperature of 63-67C. It only uses 5.5 – 6 grams of coffee for producing 40ml of espresso, so you get a weak and under extracted espresso shot due to the low coffee to water ratio. The milk function is automatic, but the milk turns out bubbly compared to many other home machines I’ve tried – acceptable, but not great.
So do foodies want this for Christmas? It is obvious that it’s a clean and easy machine to operate. It is fairly consistent. However, the coffee in itself is worth another paragraph of discussion – it is not fresh. It is not even fresh ground. It is in fact, roasted and ground somewhere very far away and shipped here (after the green coffee was shipped from origin to the roasting plant). It is not special, although the coffee in itself too is consistent. High volume coffee like this is naturally a very different business than what I come from, and I am fine with that. It is when coffee is packaged and sold as something special – or “Grand Cru” like Nespresso calls it – that it becomes a problem. The price per cup has very little to do with what’s in the cup, it is mostly about what is around the cup. Selling machines cheap and generic coffee camouflaged as Grand Crus expensive, will make Nespresso money in the long run. It’s just that it’s not about the coffee.
^ Each Nespresso coffee capsule contains 5-6 grams of ground coffee and makes one cup of coffee (Image by: Joe Shlabotnik)
However, if you don’t care so much about the flavour and want an easy way to brew consistently fine espresso, I would definitely want this for Christmas. And it was fun playing around with it, although quite honestly, the flavours (and I tasted all 16 of them) gave me goose bumps.
Retail price: $ 399
Price per cup: approx. $0.55-0.65
[Editor found the price on Wikileaks]
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Had a Nespresso machine for almost four years now. Espresso is quick and no clean-up so perfect for those hungover mornings. Not the best tasting coffee but so convenient.
Oh dear.
Nespresso is not quality coffee on many levels. Nestle is also one of the most unethical companies involved in coffee. I’m honestly surprised to see this post up on UD. Sad too ;(
What is quality? Multi-nationals is tough business, and easy to dislike. To be fair, though, I was in Huila, Colombia over the last couple of weeks, where I realized Nespresso pays premiums much higher than any other company. Maybe even higher than my own company, which for the best quality coffees from the area pay around $1.50 above the commodity market (pr lbs green coffee). Meaning, Nespresso is currently paying premiums higher than most of the smaller specialty coffee companies you’re buying coffee from. Probably paying twice as much as Starbucks and the other chain operations we have around in Vancouver, but that is just guessing. I also want to point out that Nesle is doing research on coffee that is valuable for the entire industry, although most of it is unfortunately unavailable. My point about Nespresso is – the product is generic, the packaging fantastic. I think that is very interesting, shocking and irritating. But at least I know for sure they pay high premiums to farmers – now, there’s plenty to say about this too on a deeper level (there’s no guarantee the same farmer gets to sell coffee to them again, unless they’re sincerely quality-oriented farmers and invests in their farms – the conversation with Nespresso stops at farmgate etc.).
I don’t in particular like multi-nationals, and there are certainly many many things about Nestle to talk about. However, this is a review of their one product line and machine. Feel free to contact me by email via urbandiner if you’d like to talk more about coffee.
We have had a Nespresso machine for about 4 years now and love it. Capsules are easy to get (the Bay downtown is the only outlet for them but not difficult to get to) and it’s quick and simple to use. Our friends pop by all the time to have a cup and a quick visit. We’d definitely replace it with another when then time comes.. hopefully not for a long time. Oh… we had a mechanical problem shortly after we got our machine and the staff were amazing at replacing it for us with no fuss. They even gave us a loaner one while we waited for our replacement one and apologized further with several tubes of pods.
I’ve spent way too many exhaustive hours discussing the “virtues” or lack thereof of Nespresso and Nestle foods. I’ve been interviewed on the subject, been on NPR about it, the gamut. Let me see if I can bullet point a few salient details:
- Nestle, along with Kraft Foods, Sara Lee, and P&G were pretty much single handedly responsible for the breakup of a multinational coffee “cartel” that in the 1980s and 1990s were responsible for farmers around the globe getting decent prices per lb for their green coffee; because of this (and Nestle’s heavy lobbying of the IMF to give massive loans to Vietnam in the 1990s to start growing crappy cheap robusta), farmers who saw $2.00 a lb in 1989 were getting as little as $0.06 per lb in 2002. It’s taken a massive effort on the part of concerned consumers and ethical retailers (including Starbucks, btw) to bring prices back to something approaching a living wage. Nestle through various actions thru the IMF and other global bodies continues, where they can, to force pricing down,
Nestle buys literally the world’s cheapest coffees. Some are so bad they had to invent and patent a steaming process to remove almost all flavour from coffee; this stuff is used for filler in their “special moments” flavoured coffee powders, etc.
Nestle is a bad corporate citizen. I won’t go into their practices on baby milk substitutes (plenty of internet info on that), but I can bring up one key example I researched in 2002. In that year, when Nestle was releasing press releases on how great a corporate citizen they were and how charitable they were with this and that, I was able to research the fact that they donated exactly 6 minutes equivalent worth of their annual profit (not gross, but just profit) to coffee related charities or charities in coffee producing countries. 6 minutes’ worth.
I could go on, and go into detail about the coffee used in the capsules, the waste the capsules produce, etc and how they spend more on a single George Clooney advert than they do annually on the coffee that goes into their major capsule lineup, but suffice to say, Nestle is not a good company and should never be promoted in any way by anyone concerned with good ethics in food.
So, should I return your Christmas present… or is there some wiggle room here?
@Barrett – are you telling me that 49th has started doing Nespresso capsules? Is this like Intelligentsia doing pod espresso in the mid 2000s? (dirty little secrets!)