It’s a prosperous time for coffee capsule manufacturers

Companies involved within the coffee capsule industry are reaping the rewards of booming sales figures of Nespresso and Keurig compatible pods, numerous news reports have proclaimed recently.

One example of the sector’s strength is the recent expansion undertaken by the Mad Coffee Capsule who has launched a new manufacturing facility in the Wetherill Park area of New South Wales. According to the Australian edition of Bean Scene Magazine, the new 5,000 square-metre plant was constructed at a cost of AUD£23m.

“We’re taking our roasting experience and adapting that to capsule production,” Kane Bodiam, Mad Coffee Capsule’s Global Business Development Manager, told the publication.

“I want society to move away from instant coffee, lift the single serve market, and give everyone the ability to produce great coffee at home…It’s about quality control and keeping capsule production here in Australia.”

At full capacity it is expected that around 2,000 capsules could be produced every minute, and preliminary figures estimate that a staggering 130 million units will be made by the end of the next financial year. In layman’s terms, that’s a hell of a lot of coffee.

It is a similar story too across the Pacific in America, where Keurig reign supreme in the capsule market.

Pod Pack, based in Baton Rouge, make licensed pods of coffee and tea for a whole host of global brands under the banners of Folgers and Maxwell House and they too are bracing themselves for expansion after posting some results: Last year they made over 100 million pods of coffee.

In order to meet demand the Louisiana-based company is set to spend in excess of $10 million in order to expand their current manufacturing capabilities.

“It just seems like an overnight excess,” said Tom Martin.

 Martin, the current vice president, explained that the bulk of production was in the northeast of the United States and Europe, and so there was a huge demand for a facility in the south of America.

And why are companies like these succeeding at the moment?

According to Mintel, a market research firm housed in London, claim that last year consumers in the US spent upwards of $3bn on single-cup coffee derivatives, and that number is only expected to rise in the next couple of years as the divide between freshly roasted coffee beans and capsules continues to narrow as people turn to these easy to use and versatile single-serve machines.

picture: Shinichiro Hamazaki (creative commons)