I worked inside the coffee pod business for years. These are the 6 things that made me walk away.
When we started saying them publicly, the legal letters arrived from companies much bigger than ours.
By Jonathan Johansson, Co-founder of Coffydoor
4.8 on Trustpilot
1,000+ five-star reviews
More than 15 million cups served
What are you actually paying for when you buy a coffee pod?
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 going.
It was going 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.
Meanwhile, I had watched big names sell stale, mass-produced, over-roasted pods as premium coffee. Coffee was no longer being made for taste first. It was being made for speed, margins and shelf life.
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.
1
The rent is in the pod you drink at home
Think about the coffee shops in the most expensive parts of a city. Beautiful windows, polished counters, staff, storage and 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.
2
You are paying for the famous person holding the cup
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.
3
The supermarket takes its share before you taste anything
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.
4
The coffee is made for the shelf before it is made for your cup
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.
5
A fraction of a gram looks tiny until you multiply it by millions
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 comes with a full taste guarantee.
Paying less should not mean receiving less coffee.
6
The dark roast solves a shelf-life problem, not a taste problem
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.
So I walked away
Leaving the industry was one of the hardest decisions I had made.
I did not leave because I hated coffee or wanted to declare war on the large brands. I left because I could no longer ignore how far the pod had moved from the reason people buy coffee in the first place.
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 also 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.
4.8 on Trustpilot
1,000+ five-star reviews
More than 15 million cups served
Then the legal letters arrived
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. A small company offering more coffee per capsule, a fresher process and a 60-day taste guarantee gave them a reason to ask why the familiar brand was not doing the same.
We are not here to destroy the coffee industry. We are here to raise the standard.
Then people started telling other people
Coffydoor began as an idea that sounded almost too simple: make the coffee the important part of pod coffee again.
Customers shared it. Reviews came in. One order became another.
Today, Coffydoor has served more than 15 million cups. The brand has a 4.8 rating on Trustpilot and more than 1,000 five-star reviews.
That does not mean you will like every blend. 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.
Try the coffee, not the story
Every first order is covered by Coffydoor's 60-day taste guarantee.
Order it. Drink it in the machine you already own. Compare it with the pods in your cupboard.
If Coffydoor is not the best capsule coffee you have tried, email the support team within 60 days. You can keep the product and receive your money back.
No return. No argument. No need to pretend you liked it because a founder wrote a long page about it.
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 capsules. You can customise the mix and add Decaf if you prefer.
Choose a one-time order, or subscribe for the lower price and select delivery every 4, 6, 8 or 12 weeks. A subscription can be paused, skipped, moved or changed from your account.
The current starter offer also includes free home delivery, a thermos mug and a coffee tin.
Try Coffydoor risk free for 60 days
120 pods | Works with Nespresso Original machines | Free home delivery | 60-day taste guarantee
Jonathan Johansson, Co-founder, Coffydoor