Why coffee took 100 years longer than tea
Take coffee. The Philips Senseo coffee maker was the first single serve mass market coffee system. Up till then you brewed a pot of coffee, it took a lot of time, between 10 and 20 minutes and produced way too much coffee for one person. People ask for a ‘cup of coffee’ not for a pot of coffee.
So why did no one figure out that people who just wanted ‘a cup of coffee’? They had a solution or so the coffee industry thought… instant coffee out of a jar. Not quite espresso, also another single-serve solution, but an espresso does require some skill in making and the taste is maybe a bit too intensive for some.
It turns out that the food manufacturer in the early 1990’s Sara Lee/Douwe Egberts spotted this discrepancy and made a simple solution, put the coffee in pads. They developed the idea with the help of external consultants. Douwe Egberts was now moving beyond its comfort zone, it is after all a food company. They needed somebody to manufacture their new single serve coffee machine. Eventually after some searching and persuading they got Philips to bring the coffee system to market as ‘Senseo’. The rest is history.
The point here is that a highly competitive market (domestic coffee) took almost a century to figure out something that another highly competitive market (domestic tea) had ‘discovered’ before, the teabag. The Philips DNA was to make coffee machines, Douwe Egberts was to prepare coffee. By placing the consumer at the centre of their innovation thinking either one could have come up with the idea, what is strange is that it took so long.
Cautley Consulting 