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Luigi Lavazza S.p.A.
Lavazza sells coffee — roasted beans, ground coffee, and single-serve capsules — to homes, cafés, and offices around the world.
Lavazza is one of the world's biggest coffee companies, and its core business is simple: it buys raw coffee beans from farmers, roasts and blends them, and sells the finished coffee to people who drink it at home and to businesses that serve it in cafés, restaurants, and offices.
The company is still controlled by the Lavazza family and is headquartered in Turin, Italy. It started in 1895 when Luigi Lavazza opened a small grocery store there and began blending coffee from different origins — an idea that was unusual at the time. Today its brands include Lavazza espresso and the single-serve capsules that slot into coffee machines, a fast-growing category where it competes with Nestlé and its Nespresso system, and with Keurig Dr Pepper in the US pod market. In Italy, Lavazza is close to a household ritual, and it has spent heavily to turn that home advantage into a global brand, including a long-running sponsorship of tennis grand slams and a push into the US and other markets. The business earns money on the margin between what it pays for green coffee and what shoppers pay for a bag or a capsule — plus, crucially, the recurring sales of capsules that keep people coming back to the same machine. That repeat-purchase model is why capsule systems are so valuable in coffee. One weakness: coffee prices swing with weather and harvests, and a family-owned company has less room to absorb a bad year than a giant like Nestlé.
Lavazza has grown partly by buying other coffee businesses to expand abroad. It acquired France's Carte Noire in 2016 and the UK's Gaggia and the US brand EKOCUPS-style pod businesses through its Lavazza Professional arm, and in 2022 it paid about €350 million for a French coffee group, consolidating its position in Europe. The bet is straightforward: take a beloved Italian brand and sell it to the rest of the world, one espresso and one capsule at a time.
Saved answer · last researched 10 Nov 2026