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We drink an estimated 70 million cups of coffee every day at home. This sounds like a lot until you compare it with the 165 million cups of tea we also manage to get through during the same 24 hours.

There’s a national mindset that perceives coffee as something special to be consumed, while its rival is a staple of home comforts. The coffee suppliers’ perennial conundrum has always been how to redress the balance.

Coffee found in food-service outlets has only relatively recently been able to genuinely claim high-value status, according to Jeffrey Young, managing director of sector specialist research consultancy Allegra Strategies.

“Over the past seven to 10 years there’s been an explosion on the High Street of espresso-based coffee drinks. Before that, in food service it was either instant or filter. Now, though, the game’s really moved up with the arrival of chains such as Starbucks, Nero and Costa, all of which are serving up a much better drink within a certain lifestyle environment.

“The experience on the High Street has given consumers a taste of something they now expect. So they either drink less coffee in the home or else look to replicate that experience. Even on the instant front you see a better quality of coffee from the likes of the Sara Lee Douwe Egberts brand and Nestlé.”

Linking up with coffee-maker manufacturers – Sara Lee Douwe Egberts with Philips (Senseo), and Nestlé with Krups (Dolce Gusto) – to produce single-serve systems using specifically designed pods containing real coffee, is the principal strategy aimed at developing a new category within the in-home market.

More than 15 million Senseo systems have been sold worldwide. This includes 350,000 in the UK, a positive but comparatively slow local response spread over the past three years, admits Annette Zollo, Sara Lee’s UK marketing director.

“In the UK, consumers are largely moving from an instant base, with real coffee perceived as a special treat if indeed being drunk at all. While we’re very happy with the take-up, we’ve come in from a different starting point. It wouldn’t be realistic to expect the same speed of penetration as in a country where real coffee and drip filters are the norm.

“What we find is that UK consumers sometimes have very little confidence in the coffee that they’re able to prepare for themselves. It’s that perception that Senseo is targeting to break, and to demonstrate that it’s perfectly possible – and, indeed, easy – to make a great cup of coffee at home.”

Strong competition
With its single-serve system retailing at around £50, Senseo claims it holds 80% of the £5.1m UK pod market, and a 4.1% share of all roast and ground products. It faces stiff competition, however, from Nestlé’s Dolce Gusto, for which RPC Tedeco-Gizeh (France) has developed the individual dispense capsules.

As well as being designed to withstand the Dolce Gusto machine’s high 14-bar integrated pressure system – usually only found in professional coffee shop machines, and key to delivering each drink’s high quality taste – the capsules were thermoformed in PP with an EVOH barrier layer to provide protection against oxygen and extend shelf-life.

The extent to which these systems might take hold is a moot point. While accepting that consumers are looking to recreate the food-service experience at home, James Sweeting, director of own-label sector supplier Lincoln & York, is sceptical.

“I doubt whether coffee could become convenient as a pod, in the same way that tea is as a bag. Pod machines work very well on the continent, but I’m not sure that they’ll be as successful in the UK.

“Those who take it seriously, swear by them, but for most consumers that isn’t going to happen. People can get easily bored with gadgets; look at bread makers, for example. There have been passing fads for espresso and cappuccino machines before, and they’ve not really taken off.”

Meanwhile, Sara Lee has a more accessible, far less expensive new line on the market in the shape of its recently introduced Douwe Egberts branded Café Switch. This is the latest in a long list of functional packaging-assisted products that have tried but not always succeeded to tempt instant-coffee drinkers to become more adventurous.

Remember its own Cafinesse liquid coffee product, which picked up the Starpack Supreme Gold Star award in 1999 but subsequently sank like a stone?

Instant upgrade
Café Switch is a coffee drink with milk and flavours to which you can add either hot or cold water, and “is basically positioned to upgrade consumers’ instant coffee experience as well as providing a nice, everyday treat”, explains Zollo.

“We launched it last October and effectively created a new coffee product category within a matter of weeks. The pack is a unique, patented composite of thermoformed plastics bonded to a composite aluminium and plastic foil lid. Because the coffee-lover has to pump the pack to prepare the drink, it introduces a degree of ritual into the process that is dependent upon the consumer’s direct interaction. They make it work – they make the drink frothy.”

It’s fun, even reassuringly unpretentious in its egg-box style outer carton, but it could also further the suspicion that the concept of a ‘real’ cup of coffee made at home might somehow just be outside of the consumer mindset.

“The great majority of consumers simply don’t understand the core product itself, or how to make it,” says Sweeting.

“The great thing about tea is that there are only two ways you can go: leaf or bag, both straightforward. The same should be true of coffee: use a cafitière and just add roasted ground and hot water.”