In 1975 Nestlé employee Eric Favre stood in a crowded espresso bar near the Pantheon in Rome and noticed that the busiest barista pumped his lever again and again, forcing air and pressurized water through the grounds to build a thicker crema. Back in Switzerland, Favre set out to trap that technique inside a hermetically sealed aluminum capsule, and Nestlé patented the system in 1976. The early machines were bulky, and the 1986 launch as an office appliance in Switzerland, Italy, France, and Japan flopped, since break rooms wanted big pots, not single shots from pricey pods.

In the 1990s executive Jean-Paul Gaillard rebuilt Nespresso as a luxury membership: Le Club, direct sales only, boutiques styled like jewelers starting with Paris in 2000, and George Clooney, said to be chosen by club members. When patents began expiring around 2012, cheap compatible pods arrived, the Swiss chain Denner won the right to sell them, and French regulators stopped warranty threats against third party capsules. Nespresso answered in 2014 with Vertuo, whose pods spin at 7,000 rpm and carry barcodes that tell the machine how to brew. Gaillard himself later founded a rival making biodegradable compatible pods, and in 2019 Nestlé bought the rights to market Starbucks consumer products.

• Inventor Favre resigned in 1990 after clashing with Gaillard over mechanics versus image.
• Nespresso guarded its system with around 1,700 patents, yet held only 3 percent of the US single serve market against Keurig’s 70 percent.
• Matt Damon reportedly earned $3 million for his ads, and a 2026 campaign shifted the spotlight to Dua Lipa and iced drinks.
• Each original capsule uses about one gram of aluminum, and the global recycling rate hovers around 24.6 percent.
• Later moves included pens made with Caran d’Ache from recycled pods, B Corp certification in 2022, and compostable paper pods in 2023.