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Italy’s biggest chain for coffee pod shops, Tutto Capsule started business because of the quick growth in consumer popularity for capsules and single-serve coffee. (Photo by Tutto Capsule)
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The compostable capsule launched earlier this year by Luxembourg’s Capsul’in Pro company is produced 100% of bio-based material. (Photo by Capsul'in Pro)
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The coffee market for capsules has been exploding during the last 10-15 years and market intelligence projects annual growth of 6.8% at least through 2025. (Photo courtesy by HaymanCoffee)
The capsule industry and single-serve coffee market has been a hot topic ever since the launch of luxury home editions of the Swiss food giant Nestle’s Nespresso machines first started to surge to mainstream popularity in the new millennium between 2005-2010 and new innovations will support continuing impressive growth for the sector, industry officials and market intelligence sources confirm.
“The coffee market for capsules continues to be very fast moving,” Adele Rava, marketing manager and area sales manager for Italy’s Senzani Brevetti told STiR coffee and tea in late October. “We see so many innovative ideas materializing into new products all the time and it’s a sector that continues to develop very quickly, so it’s very exciting,” she said.
From bags to tins, capsules and pods, Senzani Brevetti built its brand recognition for decades as a manufacturer of automatic packaging machines for all sizes of business, successfully registering 43 different patents for its innovative packaging systems by 2017. Based in Faenza, in the northeast Italian province of Ravenna in the Emilia-Romagna region, it is however the specialized packaging solutions that Senzani offers for the entire capsule process covering and offering compatible solutions for all of the most popular capsule makers including K-Cup, Nespresso, and DolceGusto that gives the company an edge in the key capsule coffee markets of the US and Europe, said Rava.
The global demand for capsules as a consumer favorite in the coffee industry continues growing at such high rates that even the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t have a negative impact on it, with the global market value of coffee pods and capsules projected to surge to US$34.83 billion by 2025, rising from US$25.07 billion in 2020 and from $16.558 billion in 2019, according to market intelligence from the Rome-based Tutto Capsule company.
“The demand for single-serve coffee has been growing steadily for the past 10 years and single-serve consumption is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 6.8% between 2020 and 2025,” said Tutto Capsule in a market intelligence brief. The company specializes in designing and setting up capsules shops for the market segment known as the “store retailers industry” and is Italy’s biggest chain for coffee pod shops, according to company information.
Inspired by the rapid growth in the capsule market and booming consumer demand Tutto Capsule started business operations in earnest with the opening of 70 shops spread out across Italy in 2018 and continues to grow, adding 103 shops in 2019, 129 new stores in 2020, and 158 in 2021 as of late October, the company said in a report shared with STiR.
While coffee “is a daily habit for people of every income, age, and nationality” the capsule market has been very successful in captivating and developing new consumers as well as motivating higher consumption of existing coffee drinkers thanks to the efficient “ease-of-use of these products, their strong marketing and the wide variety of flavors” which are all part of key factors that have contributed toward the popularity of the single-serve market, the company said.
Initially invented all the way back to 1975, the Nespresso capsule machines launched in 1986 but it wasn’t until around 2005 that the booming new demand and growing consumer requests for higher variety coffees easily at home started setting off the boom that created the explosion in growth for the coffee capsule market over the past 15 years, officials said.
With the increasing focus on sustainability and need for companies to improve the environmental footprint on consumer products the early boom in capsules were quickly capped by concerns over how to ensure that capsules could become fully bio-recyclable. During the last year a number of new product launches offering the use of technology and materials resulted in 100% compostable capsules.
“When we first got into the capsule business and launched the company, we had clients who specifically requested a compostable product and we had to tell them that at that time, in 2010, it was impossible because neither the technology nor the material for that kind of capsules existed,” a spokesman for Luxembourg’s Capsul’in Pro company told STiR coffee and tea. But the accumulation of work in research and development that started 10 years ago earlier this year led to the launch of the “Zero Impact Capsule” by Capsul’in which is produced 100% of bio-based material and “certified home compostable” in a way that enables consumers to collect the capsule together with the organic waste, said the official.