Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/491374
STiR tea & coffee industry international 53 delez International and Joh. Benckiser find their footing after clearing regulatory hurdles. Benckiser purchased D.E. Master Blenders for $9.8 billion in 2013 and owns U.S. coffee retailers Caribou Coffee and Peet's Coffee & Tea as well as Senseo, the world's top sell- ing single-serve pod machine. In Canada spending last year topped $95 million on brewers which are found in 40% of households. Keurig holds a 50% share of the Canadian single-serve market, ac- cording to Euromonitor. In addition to Keurig licensed factories, Canada's Club Coffee, Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee and U.S. based Roger's Family Co. in California along with Tree House Foods in Illinois, custom pack capsules for large numbers of private label brands on both sides of the U.S. border. Capsules are very popular in France where Nespresso supplies 73% of the brewers and 85% of the capsules. It is Nespresso's largest market. Acceptance is increasing in the Scandinavian countries and Germany where Lidl has introduced Nespresso-compat- ible capsules for its Bellarom brand. In Sweden, where the capsule market grew by 24% in 2103, Lofbergs produced 12 million capsules in 2014, a growth rate of 11%. The family-owned coffee roaster launched four new capsule machines compatible with the Caffitaly system, selling 50,000 brewers last year. In Australia Mad Coffee Capsules recently constructed the largest capsule produc- tion facility in the southern hemisphere at Wetherill Park, a $15.5 million (a AU$20 mil- lion) investment to produce Nespresso-compatible and larger capsules. Surveys show that 75% of Australians drink instant coffee, a $600 million market in 2013. The market for portion packs is estimated at $150 million with 10 brands in competition. "In Australia, the boom in sales of pod coffee machines has also led to negative growth in kettles in both 2013 and 2014," writes Euromonitor senior research analyst Daniel Grimsey. Nespresso is the most popular home coffee making system in Britain where sales volume of coffee in capsules grew 26% last year. Usage climbed 45% between Febru- ary 2012 and February 2013, equal to 186 million capsules. In 2013 Nescafe invested $178 million to triple the capacity of its capsule factory at Tutbury in Derbyshire which produced 235 million capsules for the home market last year and exported 1.6 billion capsules to 50 overseas markets. Mondelez International, which generates $4 billion in coffee sales globally, will spend $50 million to build two new lines to manufacture its Tassimo beverage capsules this year. Brands produced at the $1.5 billion food and beverage manufacturing complex in Banbury,UK, include Kenco, Carte Noire, and Maxwell House. Carte-Noire is also packed in capsules compatible with Nespresso brewers. Nescafe, the world's fifth most valuable food and drink brand at $10 billion in sales, is undergoing a complete makeover, the first in its 75 year history. Nescafe's Dolce Gusto coffee system, introduced in 2006, is now a market leader in 20 of the 73 countries where it is available. The company sold 5 million single-serve brewers in 2013 and grew by 50% to nearly $1 billion in sales. Nescafe has Dolce Gusto factories in the UK and Girona, Spain and a new 50,000 m 2 facility in Schwerin, Germany that will process 60 tons of raw coffee daily on 12 production lines, filling 10 million capsules a day and more than 2 billion capsules per year by 2016. In Brazil Nestle announced it will open its first Nescafe Dolce Gusto factory outside Europe this summer. The $75 million factory located in Montes Clares, Minas Gerais will export capsules to several Latin American countries. Brazil's capsule market grew 52.4% in 2013 to 8.5 million households making it the fastest-growing market for Nespresso and Dolce Gusto capsules. Kaffa, a Portuguese capsule maker opened a plant there in 2014, closing deals with 36 Brazilian coffee brands, according to Valor Economico. To meet this demand filling and packaging equipment manufacturers including Ry- chiger in Switzerland and Siemens in Germany are simultaneously extending their lines to accommodate smaller roasters and increasing the capacity of high volume machines. OPEM, one of the largest capsule-filling machine manufacturers just opened a new 13,000 m 2 factory to manufacture large-capacity fill and seal equipment in Parma, Italy. In China Romiter Machinery Co. is one of several producing machines and capsules compatible with Keurig, Nespresso, Lavazza Blue, and Caffitaly brewers. heating) and protecting against the loss of aroma while delivering precise particle size. Grinding large volumes at high speed necessitates innovations in design beyond that required for simple ground roast. Keep it cool Dissipating heat is critical with finer grinds. Grinding surfaces become red hot from friction and the heat generated by fracturing during long production runs unless aggressively cooled. As metal sur- faces expand it is "absolutely necessary" for the roller gap to remain constant which requires accurate gap adjustment. Schmidt at Probat Burns said the UW series grinders at 300 µm can output 2,000 to 3,000 pounds per hour. Grinding to precise size is not a challenge for any grinders on the market, he said. Consis- tency over a long, high-temperature run is what sets roller grinders apart. "The hotter it gets the worse it gets," said Schmidt. In his view the engineer- ing challenge is developing grinders that control thermal expansion and respond to coffee's many variables while "maintain- ing consistency in the gap." Compacting and filling During roasting the beans swell and when air-cooled a high quantity of gas is trapped in the cells. Water quenching causes more gas to escape due to greater cell wall crack- ing but the beans retain residual moisture. Consider volume: capacity remains the same at 5-6 grams for Nespresso capsules and 8-14 grams for K-Cups but densely packing the coffee will increase the strength of the brew. The density of the coffee is really im- portant to get a consistent dose, according to Robert Melikian, c.e.o. of Automatic Brewers and Coffee Devices, Inc., (ABCD) in West Conshohocken, Penn. "When you are packing single-serve you are packing volumetrically, not with a scale. If the coffee is fluffy or overly dense it will change the weight in the capsule," he said. Using a normalizer/densifier to mix the grind is essential, said Melikian. You can only compact coffee to a cer- tain degree, perhaps 10% to 15%, Probat's Schmidt. explains. "Densifying" originally referred to compressing the coffee to fill a one pound can. It is necessary be- cause in addition to the roasted