In 1975, Eric Favre, who worked for the behemoth food company Nestlé in Vevey (Vaud), developed the coffee capsule system called Nespresso. The idea was to make espresso coffee of the same high quality that one got at the best coffee bars in Italy available in the home—to guarantee that same barista quality with every tiny cup without a lot of preparation, cleaning up, or any expertise needed.
The marketing part of it—the "crus", the Nespresso-capsule-only compatible coffee makers and accessories, the boutiques and "club" concept—developed slowly, but more than three decades later, pricey Nespresso is known around the globe, not least due to an iconic high-profile advertising campaign ("Nespresso. What Else?") featuring American actors George Clooney and John Malkovich.
Nestlé-released 2009 sales figures for Nespresso were 2.77 billion Swiss Francs (nearly US $3 billion) with an average 30% annual growth since 2000.
Eric Favre Launches His Own Products
In 1991, Eric Favre left Nestlé and founded his own successful capsule coffee company, Monodor, outside Lausanne in Vaud. As an (ex)employee of the food giant, he did not hold patents or receive royalties on his original capsule project. However, at Monodor he continued developing his capsule ideas, improving the environmental friendliness of the materials they were made from, among other things, and also selling a capsule design to Italian coffee company Lavazza. Some of the considerable royalties from the latter have gone into financing the new venture that Favre runs alongside Monodor: Tpresso, founded in 2004.
Fast forward to 2011. In January Favre launched the Tpresso tea capsule system at a press conference in Beijing and shortly after that in Zurich. On February 24, Favre and his wife Anna Maria—who has been highly involved in the Tpresso project that the couple has been researching for years at the cost, they say, of over US $35 million—met with a small group of journalists in Geneva.
Favre told the group that, if in the 1970s he’d aimed to make goof-proof, easy-to-make yet qualitatively top-flight Italian-style espresso available in the home and the office, the aim of his current Tpresso project is to fuse high tech—capsule technology, a futuristic–looking tea set and sophisticated tea maker that sets proper water temperature for each tea—with ancient Chinese tea traditions.
Traditional Tea Drinking in China Has Similarities with Wine Connoisseurship
"Tea-drinking in China is like wine tasting," Favre says. "In Europe we tend to think of tea as a hot beverage: we get this from the British. But in China, tea is served different degrees of tepid, depending on the tea. As with wine in the West, there is great appreciation of aromas and tastes. Connoisseurs will spend a lot of money on rare teas, which can cost over 5,000 Euros (US $7,000) a kilo (2.22 lbs). There are associations of savoring, sharing, serenity, and wellbeing with tea drinking.’’
Because of similarities tea tasting has with wine tasting, the Favres asked wine glass designer Jacques Pascot to design the Tpresso Tpot and Tcups (in Bayel crystal) so that the refined, subtle tastes and fragrances of each brew are optimally channeled.
To encapsulate the essences of teas, Favre developed a machine called a "tea crumbler" that crumbles leaves as gently as human fingers do, thus making the leaves "bleed." Because the machine is hermetically sealed in an inert atmosphere, no freshness is lost as crumbled leaves are quickly transferred to the capsules that protect them from light, oxygen and humidity.
Tpresso Tea Preparation and Selection
It takes less than a minute to brew a small pot of tea (one capsule produces three servings) with Favre’s machine—tea that meets the standards of China’s finest tea masters. This is just a fraction of the time it takes to steep the leaves several times over in traditional tea preparation, each time garnering different qualities from them. The Favre method offers an in-one-go culling of the top qualities of a tea that even the most sophisticated tea noses like Wu Jianming pronounce superior.
Wu Jianming, president of the Hangzhou Jiasheng Tea Co., Ltd., and a master "nose" who sits on China’s national tea production board, was also present at the Geneva meeting.
As Tpresso goes into its launch, the company (which has opened a Shanghai subsidiary) has partnered with Wu Jianming as a source of its teas—mostly rarefied ones that especially Western consumers are unlikely to be familiar with, including Red Oolong, Wuyi Shuikian, Tieguanyin, Jasmine Silver Pekoe, Anji White Tea, Westlake Lungching, Keemun Black Tea. However, Favre says Tpresso has "eight or nine other tea ‘gardens’ we plan to work with in China." According to Wu Jianming, some 1.5 million tons of tea are produced in China each year.
The Market for Tpresso in China
For the time being, Tpresso machines will be manufactured in China from European-made parts, but Favre says if all goes well, they will open a manufacturing plant in China. Retail, the machine will cost 5,000 Yuan (US $761) without capsules (which for the time being are made in Switzerland) or spring water (tap water may not be used in China or anywhere else). This may seem astronomical, until one considers that top-of-the-range Nespresso machines in China sell for 8,000 Yuan.
"We're aiming at the considerable new wealth in China," says Anna Maria Favre. "On the one hand wealthy connoisseurs, those who continue ancient tea culture traditions. But many in younger generations view tea drinking as old hat. So by meshing high tech and exclusivity with tradition, removing the need for a lot of time to prepare and clean up, or for tea ceremony expertise, we’re aiming to rekindle interest in tea appreciation among younger folks as well."
Further markets are expected to be corporate as well as high-end retail stores wishing to offer customers luxurious refreshment, and there will be a focus on spas.
Enter Special.T
As Tpresso goes peripherally into gear in Europe while focused on getting the China launch up and running, Nestlé is ratcheting up its late 2010 launch (so far in France and Switzerland only) of Special.T, a tea capsule that stays with the single-cup, own-tea-making-machine formula of Nespresso and offers 25 exclusive teas from China, Japan, Sri Lanka, India, and South Africa.
Developments promise to be interesting as markets decide what is—and what isn’t—their cup of tea.
Gail Mangold-Vine - Based in Geneva, Switzerland, Gail Mangold-Vine is the author of two books. Her work as a journalist is published worldwide.
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