By Claire Reilly

While Lavazza has long been a name associated with quality coffee in cafés around the world, the brand is a fairly recent entrant into the world of domestic portioned coffee machines in Australia. But since launching the A Modo Mio portioned system here with Electrolux last year, the brand has not looked back.

In Australia recently for the first time in over a decade, the vice president of Lavazza, Giuseppe Lavazza, spoke to Current.com.au about the brand’s history and the rise of portioned coffee around the world.

Current.com.au: Tell us about Lavazza's heritage in the portioned coffee category?

Giuseppe Lavazza: Lavazza was really pioneering this new category a long time ago. In Italy, a lot of people love to have a good espresso in their office while working. But 20 years ago, you had to call to the closest cafe and the coffee got to your desk cold. So we decided to try to penetrate this office market, but with a top quality product.

So we started in 1989 and developed our first system, Espresso Point, and it was very successful. Then in 2002, we launched our second system, Lavazza BLUE, short for Best Lavazza Ultimate Espresso. The second system offered the chance to have self-protecting capsules, so we didn’t need to have an external package to protect it. And this is a system that was established to get in the big vending market

C: Vending machines for coffee?

GL: Yes. For example in a lot of the underground stations in Milan, you can have a perfect cup of espresso Lavazza using our BLUE system. With the capsules, the coffee is protected until the moment you decide to have your cup of coffee.

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C: When did you move into domestic portioned coffee?

GL: In 2007, we decided to launch a system for households, A Modo Mio. A Modo Mio is the final evolution of the big trend that we started in 1989 — it’s cutting edge. We’re very proud of it because it’s a perfect replication of what you normally get from a professional espresso machine.

We put in the A Modo Mio system all the skills that a barista needs to prepare the perfect espresso. So the size of the capsule is optimised for the extraction of the coffee and the quantity of the coffee in the capsule is also very generous. The coffee is tamped into the capsule with the pressure of 300 kilograms, exactly the same move that a good barista does before preparing your espresso, and the coffee is protected under vacuum. We arrived at this point after 20 years of experimentation, working everyday to improve the original system.

C: What do you see as the future of portioned coffee in Australia? Will portioned machines ever replace manual or automatic machines.

GL: We think that portioned coffee will be more and more important because of the convenience, and the quality. But it’s a different experience. The portioned system is a closed system, so you’re connected to a brand and a certain type of coffee. For this reason, we offer a lot of different blends so you can find the blend you like the most. With beans — also a very important part of our business — you can move from one coffee blend to another, but the equipment is more expensive. It’s a different philosophy.

Fourth-generation member of the Lavazza family and vice president of the family coffee empire, Giuseppe Lavazza.