When we started saying them publicly, the legal letters arrived from companies much bigger than ours.
120 pods, free home delivery, 60 days to change your mind.
What is the difference between an expensive pod from a famous brand and one that costs 40% less? Most people assume the expensive one must contain better coffee. After years in the trade, I saw where a great deal of that extra money was actually going.
It went into the shop, the famous face in the advert, the supermarket, and the system required to keep the box on a shelf. Those things can make a brand look premium. None of them makes the beans better or puts more care into the roasting.
That does not mean every large coffee company makes bad coffee. It means the business is solving a different problem from the person standing at the machine in the morning. You want a good cup. The system needs a pod that can pay for everything around it, move in enormous numbers, and wait until someone buys it.
These are the six things that finally made me leave.
Think about the coffee shops in the most expensive parts of a city. Beautiful windows, polished counters, staff, storage, queues outside the door. That presence costs money every day, whether you ever walk into one of those shops or not.
The rent does not stay in the shop. It finds its way into the price of the capsules you take home. So does the cost of fitting the shop, staffing it, and keeping it open.
There is nothing wrong with enjoying a beautiful coffee shop. The problem begins when the shop is used as proof that the coffee inside the capsule must be better.
Rent can make a brand more visible. It cannot make an ordinary bean taste better.
Then there is the face. Large coffee brands spend heavily on celebrities because a familiar person can make an ordinary product feel desirable before you have tasted it.
That money has to come from somewhere. It is included in the price of the pod, a little at a time, every morning.
The celebrity may make the advert memorable. They do not choose better beans. They do not roast the coffee. They do not improve what comes out of your machine. We would rather spend that money on the coffee and the people roasting it.
Getting a box into supermarkets makes it easy to find. It also adds another business that needs to earn money from every box sold.
The supermarket needs its margin. Shelf space, distribution and promotions all have a cost. By the time the box reaches your trolley, several parts of the system have already been paid.
You are paying for that convenience, but it does not tell you anything about the beans, the roasting, or the freshness of the coffee. This is one reason an expensive pod can still taste ordinary. The price is carrying far more than the coffee inside it.
Coffee does not improve while it waits. Yet a mass-market pod has to be produced in huge numbers, stored, transported, put on a shelf, and left there until someone buys it.
When shelf life becomes the priority, every decision starts bending around it. The coffee has to survive the system. How it tastes at the end can become a secondary question.
By the time a stale pod reaches your kitchen, it has done the job it was made to do. It waited. That is the part the premium packaging cannot fix.
In large-scale pod production, the amount of coffee inside each capsule is watched very closely. A small reduction may look harmless in one pod. Multiply it across millions of capsules and it becomes a large saving for the company.
The customer experiences it differently. Less coffee can mean less body and a thinner cup, even though the box and the price still look premium.
Coffydoor puts, on average, 10% more coffee into each capsule than many standard pods. It still costs 40% less, and it comes with a full taste guarantee.
Paying less should not mean receiving less coffee.
This was the one I could not get past. Dark, aggressive roasting can flatten the differences between beans and batches. It can also cover what time has taken from the coffee. Very different coffees begin to taste much the same: bitter, burnt and heavy.
For a system built around scale and shelf life, that is useful. For the person drinking it, it means the roast is often the only thing left to taste.
Many people think they do not like pod coffee. What they may dislike is the stale, over-roasted version they have been given for years. The flat, bitter cup was not an unavoidable part of using capsules. It came from decisions made long before the pod reached your machine.
I did not want to keep defending those decisions.
The coffee has to survive the system. How it tastes at the end can become a secondary question.
Jonathan Johansson, Co-founder120 pods. Free home delivery. 60 days to decide.
I did not leave because I hated coffee. I left because I could no longer ignore how far the pod had moved from the reason people buy coffee in the first place.Jonathan Johansson, Co-founder of Coffydoor
Leaving the industry was one of the hardest decisions I had made. I did not leave to declare war on the large brands. I left because it should taste good. That was the beginning of Coffydoor.
We partnered with a third-generation, family-owned roastery in Italy that has been roasting coffee since the 1960s. Instead of putting the budget into a celebrity or a row of expensive shops, we put it into better beans, smaller and fresher batches, and coffee developed to extract properly from the machines people already owned.
The beans come mainly from family-run farms in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Ethiopia. We put more coffee into each capsule, use recycled aluminium, and make the pods work directly with Nespresso Original machines. Adapters are available for Dolce Gusto and Vertuo POP or NEXT.
Then we ship the coffee fresh and stand behind the taste for 60 days. The goal was simple: make pod coffee taste the way it was meant to.
| Coffydoor | The mass-market pod | |
|---|---|---|
| Coffee in each capsule | 5.3g, about 10% more | 4.8g average |
| Price per pod | From €0.40 | Around 40% higher |
| Roasted | Small, fresh batches in Italy | For scale and shelf life |
| Machine | Nespresso Original | Nespresso Original |
| Capsule material | 100% recycled aluminium | Varies by brand |
| If you do not like it | 60 days, keep the coffee, full refund | Standard returns |
Swipe to compare
Coffydoor figures are their own published numbers. The right-hand column reflects Jonathan's account of how mass-market pods are produced and priced. It is not a test of any named brand.
We started saying these things publicly. We explained that a premium price could be paying for the shop, the celebrity and the supermarket before it paid for better coffee. We talked about stale pods, over-roasting, and why coffee built for shelf life could still taste ordinary.
The emails came first. Then legal letters arrived from companies much bigger than Coffydoor.
My reading was that the lower price was not the uncomfortable part. The questions were. Once people understood that an expensive capsule did not have to taste thin, stale or bitter, they began comparing what was actually inside it.
We are not here to destroy the coffee industry. We are here to raise the standard.
Then people started telling other people
Figures published by Coffydoor on their own site. Coffee is personal, and any company that tells you otherwise is trying too hard. It does mean you do not have to take a risk to find out.
If it does not land
Their words, from their own page. The story should earn your attention. The coffee has to earn the second order.
Start with the Home Barista Kit
The 120-pod kit gives you 40 Espresso, 40 Ristretto and 40 Lungo. You can customise the mix and add Decaf. Every kit ships free and is covered by the 60-day taste guarantee.
Subscribe for the lower price and choose delivery every 4, 6, 8 or 12 weeks. A subscription can be paused, skipped, moved or changed from your account.
Order it. Drink it in the machine you already own. Compare it with the pods in your cupboard. No need to pretend you liked it because a founder wrote a long page about it.
TRY IT RISK FREE FOR 60 DAYSThe Home Barista Kit
60-day taste guarantee. Keep the coffee and get your money back.
Nespresso® is a third-party registered trademark. Coffydoor is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Nestlé Nespresso S.A.