Source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jRcbrc-73wErHoT-5be3R-2hB1fwD9HHHR201

By EMILY FREDRIX (AP) – Aug 11, 2010

NEW YORK — For an extra jolt to its finances, Green Mountain Coffee Rosters Inc. is selling a 7 percent stake to Lavazza, Italy’s best-selling espresso brand, for $250 million.

Together, the companies plan to develop new single-serving espresso machines and espresso capsules that will complement Green Mountain’s popular Keurig coffee makers, which brew single cups of tea or coffee.

The deal is expected to close in September and advances both company’s strategies, they said late Tuesday.

Green Mountain wants to expand its successful single-serve K-Cup lines, and Lavazza has been buying companies in India, Brazil and Argentina to fuel its growth. This is Lavazza’s biggest foreign acquisition.

Lavazza, based in Turin, has agreed to buy newly issued shares at 10 cents par value common stock at a price equal to the 60-day volume weighted average price at closing, less 7.5 percent. The deal includes the possibility of buying additional shares up to 15 percent of Green Mountain.

The deal must be approved by U.S. antitrust regulators.

The companies’ new single-serve products aren’t expected to reach the market until at least 2013.

The Keurig system’s success has been fueling growth for Green Mountain, which is based in Waterbury, Vt.

As shoppers cut spending at cafes during the recession, the systems presented a less-expensive alternative. Rival Starbucks Corp. jumped into the market in September with its Via instant coffee line.

Last month Keurig said its third-quarter revenue rose 64 percent to $311.5 million, thanks largely to rising sales of Keurig machines and accessories, which accounted for about half of the company’s revenue. It expects shipments for K-Cup packs to rise as much as 76 percent this fiscal year.

Green Mountain’s $300 million acquisition of Diedrich Coffee Inc. — one of four roasters licensed to produce K-Cups — closed in May.

The Lavazza investment will let Green Mountain make more purchases, Janney Capital Markets analyst Mitchell Pinheiro told clients in a note Wednesday. It also brings Lavazza’s brand value and expertise to Keurig products and could help with launching Keurig in Europe, he said.

He reiterated his “Buy” rating on the stock and $40 price target.

Shares of Green Mountain fell 47 cents, or 1.5 percent, to close at $30.99 Wednesday.

Source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gXjW1rzsvwdakXTZmEfHr68flG9Q

MILAN — Italian coffee maker Lavazza said on Wednesday it would buy seven percent of US company Green Mountain Coffee Roasters for 250-million-dollars (191 million euros).

The two companies will also work together to build and market espresso machines and single-serve espresso capsules designed by the Italian company, Lavazza said in a statement.

The investment is expected to be approved in September by US authorities.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters sells more than a hundred specialty coffee brands in the United States and Canada and is one of the leader in the sale of espresso machines in North America.

It closed 2009 with revenues of 803 million dollars.

Family-owned Lavazza said the deal was the biggest it had ever made abroad and part of its recent aggressive push in international markets.

Over the past four years the company has made acquisitions in India, Brasil and Argentina.

Lavazza operates in 90 countries and in 2009 posted a turnover of more than 1 billion euros.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/dining/10coffee.html?_r=1

By OLIVER STRAND

NEW YORK used to be a second-string city when it came to coffee. No longer.

At places like Bluebird Coffee Shop in the East Village, the espresso is so plush and bright that it tastes sweet on its own.

The elaborate designs in the cappuccino’s foam at Third Rail Coffee in the West Village aren’t just to show off, but are a sign that the barista properly steamed the milk so that it holds its form.

At Abraço in the East Village, you can get drip coffee brewed by the cup, not drawn from an urn.

For years New Yorkers had to look to places like Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland, Ore., or Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco for this kind of quality. Now both companies have opened roasters and coffee bars in New York. Four Barrel Coffee of San Francisco will be roasting here soon.

Meanwhile, some established cafes around the city have made moves toward roasting their own beans. Café Grumpy is already doing it, and Abraço will by the summer.

This means that New Yorkers can now drink coffee that is made from some of the best beans available in the United States, freshly roasted in town.

The difference between a cup of coffee from these new style coffee bars and what was available before is striking.

These shops use only beans that have been roasted in the past 10 days (though some say two weeks is fine), so the flavors are still lively.

The beans are ground to order for each cup. Certain coffee bars have a skyline of grinders: one for espresso, one for decaffeinated espresso, one for brewed coffee. If they offer more than one variety of espresso bean, that gets its own grinder, too.

Milk is steamed to order for each macchiato or latte. A telltale sign is an arsenal of smaller steam pitchers, instead of one big one.

And coffee bars reaching for the highest rung use only manual espresso machines run by baristas who, in the past three years, have been able to attend classes given by the leading roasting companies in the intricacies of these devices. Many chain stores are turning to automatic machines with preset levels for coffee, temperature and timing.

For brewed coffee, there are French press pots, filter cones or machines like the Clover or Bunn’s new Trifecta.

Some of the obsessiveness may get a bit off-putting. Want an espresso to go at Ninth Street Espresso? Forget it. The baristas there believe it should be drunk immediately from a warm ceramic cup. Want a cappuccino made from single-origin beans at Kaffe 1668? Sorry, you’ll be told, but milk would overpower the subtle flavors of the coffee. Wonder why the barista pulled and tossed out two shots of espresso before she served you yours? She was making sure it was perfect, the coffee evenly tamped, the water temperature ideal for the particular beans, the timing just right. (The best baristas will “dial in” throughout the day, tasting the espresso and adjusting the grind and dose.)

Want a double espresso? You’ll have to buy two singles.

Today, most of the chains use about seven grams of ground coffee for a two-ounce shot. Espresso pods are filled with around five grams.

Baristas at the best places in town, like Bluebird Coffee Shop or Joe, tamp down between 19 and 21 grams. Often the espresso is even more concentrated because it’s pulled “short,” with less water, so that the final volume is a thick 1.5 to 2 ounces.

With that much coffee — and care — put into each shot, baristas feel that a larger shot, with more water, would compromise the quality of the espresso.

This awakening has led some unlikely businesses to offer serious, artful drinks. Saturdays Surf, a minimalist surf shop in SoHo, has a vintage la Marzocco machine next to the cash register. At Moomah, a children’s center in TriBeCa, parents can enjoy one of the city’s more artful cappuccinos.

Even restaurants, where coffee has long been an afterthought, are getting in on the act.

Superior coffee, day after day: increasingly it’s the rule in New York, not the exception.

Source: http://blogs.bnet.com/business-news/?p=3025

As it plots its comeback from the great store-count implosion of 2008, Starbucks Corp. (SBUX) is doing some tinkering with its stores. It’s great to see, even if not all the ideas seem like winners.

On the plus side, the company is toning down its corporate green-and-white color scheme and building stores that look more like homey neighborhood coffeehouses, done in more subtle earth tones. Starbucks’ 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea store in Seattle started this trend, which another experimental store in Seattle’s busy Capitol Hill neighborhood, Olive Way, will continue when it reopens in the fall after a remodel.

Another winner was Starbucks’ decision to go to free Wi-Fi — it had to happen.

Also good: expansion into beer and wine at the Olive Way store, to accompany an expanded menu. The liquor additions seem natural — after jittering up on coffee all day, you might want to come down with a glass of wine.

But here’s one innovation that’s more questionable — Olive Way’s move into a layout described as “coffee theater.” That is, the espresso machines will be smack in the middle of the restaurant instead of behind a counter. Surrounded by narrower counters, the idea is to bring customers closer and turn coffee making into entertainment.

That sounds great if you’re a latte-seeking mom with a couple of squirmy toddlers. The kids would probably be entranced, though you might have to child-leash them to keep their fingers off the machinery. But here’s the bigger problem: Espresso machines are loud. And lots of people hang out at Starbucks to do business — working on laptops or calling clients from cellphones. It sounds like this store design will leave no quiet corner from which to make a call or think about that proposal you’re writing.

However that works out, we’ll hear more about it, as Starbucks is quietly ramping up its advertising. Historically, Starbucks advertised very little, allotting only about 1 percent of revenue to marketing, but it recently indicated its marketing spending will increase this year.

We’ll have to wait and see those ads to determine whether more advertising is a good move. It’s an opportunity to help renovate the brand, though — for a couple of years now, the company has been best known for closing stores, or for letting gun-nuts wave their pistols around while waiting in line for lattes. With a new ad campaign, Starbucks has a chance to redefine what it stands for in customers’ eyes.

by ASHLEY M. HEHER

Source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g9Xj4HqqJPY85EkUQpqPloCnWYHwD9GIAPI00

As experiments go, this one isn’t flashy.

But the success — or failure — of one Starbucks cafe on the edge of a trendy Seattle neighborhood could ripple through the nation’s coffee house industry.

Because where Starbucks goes, others follow.

Dubbed “Olive Way,” the store is the biggest percolator yet for ideas that the world’s largest coffee company has been testing separately at nearly a dozen locations around the globe. And what succeeds at Olive Way will most likely be spread to other Starbucks stores around the country.

With muted, earthy colors, an indoor-outdoor fireplace, cushy chairs, and a menu with wine from the Pacific Northwest’s vineyards and beer from local craft brewers, this 2,500-square-foot shop in the Capitol Hill neighborhood will reopen in the fall with espresso machines in the middle.

“It’s going to feel very different,” said Kris Engskov, Starbucks’ regional vice president.

The machines at Olive Way will be part of what executives call a coffee theater. Counters will be narrower — a slim as a foot in some places — to bring customers closer to baristas; the machines will brew one cup at a time to extract deeper flavor from beans.

The store will be the chain’s only location that sells beer and wine in the U.S., though another Seattle test cafe that doesn’t carry the Starbucks brand began selling alcohol last year. The menu at Olive Way will be bigger, full of savory foods that pair with coffee, wine and beer. And customers will be able to customize the offerings, some of which will be freshly made.

The decor is to offer a departure from Starbucks’ sometimes formulaic green-and-tan — with local artists’ work, regionally reclaimed building materials, a community work table and a meeting area set off by a sliding door.

As at any restaurant chain using its stores as real-life laboratories, there’s no guarantee every idea from Olive Way will be successful or be implemented across the company. And the company wouldn’t say how much it’s spending on the effort, or how soon elements from the shop might expand to other locations.

But executives are optimistic that some will find their way to other locations, especially in vibrant urban neighborhoods where the chain can attract affluent customers who may prefer a low-key hangout over a crowded bar.

The pilot shows how hard Starbucks is working reinvigorate its brand, which stumbled under the weight of hyper-paced over-expansion. The chain closed hundreds of stores and cut scores of jobs, and founder Howard Schultz returned to help the company re-emerge.

Now, Starbucks plans more measured growth and is working to relax its corporatized image by returning to its days as a place where people want to linger for hours sipping coffee. It plans to offer free, unlimited Wi-Fi in all company-run stores; it’s letting customers tailor drinks even more, and it’s opening stores with more community flavor. A Seattle shop uses an old bleacher from a nearby high school for shelving, and a New York City store’s floors and counters are made of wood reclaimed from a century-old Pennsylvania barn.

All the changes are part of an appeal for more afterwork customers at a chain that gets the bulk of its in-store business before 11 a.m.

“The key in the restaurant business is to differentiate themselves, and clearly they’re making a move to do that,” said Morningstar restaurant analyst R.J. Hottovy. “I think the idea of trying to localize the business, that’s an aspect that will certainly work and help differentiate the brand and make it a lot less cookie-cutter than what you see in standard Starbucks.”

It will be a challenge. Gourmet coffee shops still sold 53 percent of specialty coffee drinks like mochas and lattes last year, but that was down from 57 percent a year earlier, according to data from market research firm The NPD Group.

The coffee business has become increasingly competitive as restaurants — from independent doughnut shops to Goliath’s like McDonald’s Corp. — go after Starbucks. Servings of specialty drinks rose 17 percent at fast-food chains and 23 percent at doughnut shops this year, and they fell 8 percent at gourmet cafes.

Starbucks plans to file building permits Friday with Seattle city officials to renovate the store.

Source: http://www.cellular-news.com/story/43882.php

Designers In-oh Yoo & Bong-yup Song of the Metatrend Institute have developed a concept idea for a coffee­ machine that is controlled by a mobile phone.

The concept - as an introduction to the idea of personalised self-service devices - uses mobile phones to store the users personal preferences which can then be used on vending machines and similar.

The coffee machine also uses QR code enabled coffee packs which are linked to music downloads that can either be played as the coffee is made, or downloaded to the mobile phone as it is docked into the espresso maker.

Source: http://www.dzdirect.com/destination/europa/automatic-espresso-machines.html/

Commercially used espresso machines can be broadly divided into two kinds: semi-automatic and fully automatic. Fully automatic machines are also termed ’super-automatic espresso machines’. These machines are fast gaining entry into the commercial as well as the household use.

In a semi-automatic espresso machine, the amount of water used for making coffee can be determined by either the user or the machine. Also, the user has to dispose and dose the coffee grounds. The user also steams the milk using a steam wand.

An automatic espresso machine may offer automatic brewing, in which the machine defines the amount of water to be used. These machines typically have two settings, single and double shot.

Various automatic machines also offer automatic dosing, in which the machine takes in the proper amount of coffee, and discards it after brewing. Coffee is ground, dosed, brewed and discarded automatically in a maker which offers automatic grinding. The bypass doser feature in some machines allows one to use ground coffee and adjustable dosage.

Semi-automatic espresso machines are those used at homes or a small scale office or restaurant. A heat exchanger or distributor is used to heat the brewing water. This is one of the most important differences between automatic espresso machines and good home espresso making machines. The boiler is used for the steam, and is kept at a higher temperature. This also ensures that the steam is available at all times.

While single boiler machines use only one boiler for preparing steam and heating the brewing water, the heat exchanger or extra boiler makes it unnecessary to switch modes while using automatic espresso machines.

After the coffee is brewed, the pressure in the portafilter is automatically released through a valve.