By Patrick Avenell

De’Longhi Australia is investing in the promotion of its new PrimaDonna XS, the brand’s smallest footprint fully automatic coffee machine, encouraging retailers to attract consumers to this product through the brand’s bean-to-cup strategy.

Consumers are also being targeted through print campaigns and public relations — the company this morning held a briefing for consumer, lifestyle and women’s titles that focused on the combination of one-touch functionality with adjustability, depending on the user’s preference.

Held at Manu Feildel’s demonstration kitchen in Woollahra, east Sydney, which is fitted out with De’Longhi integrated cooking appliances, trade marketing manager Mark Nesci and Elle Gentle from the Barista Basics Coffee Academy demonstrated how consumers can choose to either froth the milk themselves on the PrimaDonna XS or use De’Longhi Instant Frothing Device (IFD) to prepare the textured, velvety milk so adored by Australian coffee drinkers.

Both the steam wand and the IFD come in the box and are quickly interchangeable, so a couple with split preferences can still mix and match with minimal fuss.

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A true coffee aficionado, Elle Gentle provided an interesting lesson in the history of coffee. She said the potent effects of caffeine were discovered in 400AD when a goat herder realised his flock ‘grew wings’ after chewing on the fruit of a particular bush.

Over the course of the next 1600 years, our civilisation has achieved greatness: we are now about to press one button to transform those beans into flat whites, lattes, cappuccinos and espressos. You can even make two espressos simultaneously through the XS’s double spout.

Joining Nesci and Gentle in attendance at the demonstration were De’Longhi general manager Tom Mitchell, and Ricel Bernado and Glacel Lubrin-Zabat from the marketing team. This is an exciting time for De’Longhi: new products across many ranges are being rolled out for the Christmas sales and the company’s beloved South Sydney Rabbitohs have all but secured a Top 2 finish in the NRL.

“The PrimaDonna XS has been incredibly well-received in the trade and the first shipment has been distributed,” Nesci said. “We are really opening consumers’ eyes and minds to a coffee machine that is different and much smaller than anything we’ve done before.”

The PrimaDonna XS is 19.5 centimetres across compared to around 30 centimetres for a traditional De’Longhi full automatic.

“The initial feedback is very good: people are loving the heat of the coffee – this is much improved.”

The temperature of coffee can plummet as much as 10° Celsius when hitting the cup, which is a big problem in a country that especially loves piping hot beverages. In addition to making the pour temperature hotter, De’Longhi also recommends preheating the cup to reduce this reduction.

Elle Gentle from Barista Basics.

The PrimaDonna XS is RRP $1,999.
A cup of coffee from a café is around $3.50.
A cup of capsule coffee is around $0.75.

Elle Gentle from Barista Basics said a cup of espresso uses around 7 grams of coffee. So a 500-gram bag of Bay Beans coffee beans at $29.70 will make 70 cups of coffee at 42 cents each.

If a user can completely replace café purchasing, it will be ahead after 650 cups of coffee, or just shy of two years at one cup per day.

Capsule drinkers will take quite a bit longer to get ahead: as they are only saving around 33 cents per cup, it will take 6057 cups before they are ahead – that’s around 16 years at one cup per day. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the quality of the coffee you are drinking.

Mark Nesci from De'Longhi.