NESTLE FINALLY LETS RIVAL SHOPS SELL ITS COFFEE PODS

The first coffee pod was invented in 1934 by Italian Francesco Illy who put coffee in pressurized cans filled with inert nitrogen

Modern coffee pods – plastic capsules which make one serving of coffee – were invented in the 1990s

The Italian firm Lavazza is credited with pioneering the pod, as its machines became popular in offices

Rivals soon followed and today around one in three of all coffee pods sold are from Nespresso

Until 2014, Nestle held around 1,700 patents that blocked rivals from making knock-off capsules

Last year coffee pods were banned from offices in Hamburg on environmental grounds

NESTLE has made a bid to win back the dominance it once enjoyed in the coffee market.

The Swiss-owned food group has decided for the first time to allow its pioneering Nespresso coffee pods to be sold by rivals.

Currently Nestle only allows its pods – small plastic airtight capsules which make one cup of coffee when put in to a machine – to be sold on its Nespresso website or in its stores.

But market share has slipped massively since several patents began expiring in 2010, allowing rivals to make similar pods, which fit Nespresso’s own machines.

Where once it sold half of all coffee pods, it now only sells one in three, in a market worth £4.5bn a year. The firm has begun installing Nespresso N-Point sales terminals in German stores to fight off the threat of competitors. It is not known whether the trial will be rolled out to UK stores.

Jean-Philippe Bertschy, an analyst with bank Vontobel, was upbeat about the decision. ‘This is to be seen positively as a way for Nespresso to find new consumers,’ he said.