A weirdly perfect product for me
So Nescafe went and released a product that perfectly fits into my life, in a way that frustrates me with how obvious it is.
Weird Coffee Person
I'm definitely quite into my coffee.
I spent a few years figuring out what I enjoyed, and invested around £400 total in the equipment I use to turn locally sourced roasted beans into tasty filter coffee - sometimes I do coldbrew or a moka pot, but generally it's my V60, Aeropress, or Wilfa Performance (if you're in the market for a setup in the UK they have some really decent combo deals on their website).
But I don't just drink filter, it's just what I'm comfortable making at home - espresso is waaaaaayyyy too much of a hobby for me. I love espresso, but I'm happy to pay for it when the mood strikes and there are plenty of excellent speciality coffee options near me.
Hell, I don't just drink filter and espresso - I'll drink any old muck if it's convenient. I have a real penchant for those £1.25 iced coffee cartons. I find them very hard to resist. £1.25 for 250ml of questionably stomachable iced coffee isn't exactly amazing financial management though. Enter Nescafe...
A Really Obvious Product
Yeah it's just an iced coffee concentrate.
I've done some cursory googling and it appears to be a bit of a niche thing already in the US, but it's completely new in the UK as far as I know, and it slots astonishingly well into my exact needs.
It's £5 for a 500ml bottle, which should give around 16 of their "recommended" servings of 30ml into 150ml of milk, but in reality I tend to go a bit bigger - 40 into 200. Still, that's 12 or so coffee drinks for £5 - and it's shockingly reasonable in taste compared to the cartons. Not quite as nice, but entirely acceptable.
I fully expected a mediocre experience from this stuff but the fact I can tweak the concentration or volume to my liking fixes most issues I might have - and again, it's 40p a glass! That's fully not bad!
I'm also in the weird position of needing to get through a lot of milk lately - we get weekly deliveries and I just don't use that much day-to-day if I'm not having cereal for breakfast. This works well to tank through it before it spoils.
I only had to think about this concentrate for about 5 seconds before the price made sense - they don't need to buy, mix, or ship the milk. Sure, it's 12 coffees, but it weighs as much as 3 and takes up even less space in those big cylindrical bottles.
Unethical Consumption
Look. I know.
Nescafe is Nestle, and Nestle are profoundly the baddies. Directly quoting the wiki page:
Since the 1970s, Nestlé has faced criticism for:
- forced labour
- modern slavery
- child labour
- incidents of contaminated and infested food products
- preventing access to non-bottled water in impoverished countries
- issues around animal welfare commitments
- actively spreading disinformation about recycling
- illegal water-pumping from drought-stricken Native American reservations
- price fixing
- extensive union-busting activity
- deforestation
- lobbying to support misinformation about infant and women's nutrition. In 2014, Nestlé alone spent an estimated $160,000 on lobbying related to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.
They are among the worst corporations on the planet. I know.
I know I'm bigging up a wildly cheap coffee product in a market where it's nearly impossible to make such a thing without some human cost.
I can't in good faith say that "it's better than buying Nespresso" because that's some of the only coffee I genuinely can't stand, it's not a boycott on principle, and I also can't say with any confidence that the products it's replacing in my fridge are somehow "the same" - there are some very decent sounding companies making iced coffee I can easily access - there's a bottle of Jimmy's in my fridge next to the Nescafe.
But I gotta live my life.
I do my best to balance it by spending the majority of my coffee money on locally roasted, as-ethically-sourced-as-I-can-confirm beans and the cafes who serve them.