A forgotten kitchen gadget prompts Andrew Brooks to reflect on how an often lauded business model, while good for profit, might not benefit us all
I’d wager most kitchens have a cupboard full of disused utensils and gadgets: bread makers purchased during lockdown or toasted sandwich presses left over from student days. These objects have a liminal status between being valuable and worthless. Perhaps next year, an air fryer will join them. Once they arrived on a high tide as treasured purchases or appreciated gifts, now they’re stuck in the dry dock of domestic life, destined one day to drift away to the household recycling centre, or just be chucked in the rubbish.
One of the gizmos lurking in the back of my kitchen is a Nespresso machine: too good to throw away, but supplanted on the countertop by a proper coffee maker. Once part of my morning ritual, the machine hadn’t entered my thoughts for years until I attended a leadership training programme. The coffee there wasn’t Nespresso, but weak, black-brown, tepid liquid pumped from a vacuum flask. What piqued my recollection of the unloved Nespresso was the management lecturer citing it as an example of a business ecosystem.
The marketing strategy followed by Nestlé in the late 2000s for its Nespresso brand was something of a business revolution. When it prepared to go mainstream with its system of coffee capsules and dedicated machines, it didn’t follow a traditional route to market. The multinational food and beverage megacorporation needed to work with other firms to build the machines that used its specially designed single-use espresso pods. Nestlé cultivated a network of manufacturers – including Jura, Krups and Braun – and controlled which firms could make patented Nespresso-compatible machines.
Nestlé also positioned the system as a modern, high-tech, aspirational lifestyle product. Nespresso machines from various electronics brands appeared in high-end hotels, and capsules were sold in boutique stores, with mainstream sales coming via online subscriptions – an area Nestlé helped to pioneer. Fronting the whole operation was Hollywood superstar George Clooney, who has been an ambassador for the brand since 2006. What Nestlé created was a purposefully designed ecosystem – one that out-competed all rivals. Nespresso wouldn’t have become the commercial success it is now if the Swiss firm had gone it alone; instead, a whole network of commercial actors – and one actual film actor – were integral to the system’s success.
Hearing about this notion of a business ecosystem that depends upon collaboration between multiple firms led me to think about how this is both similar to and different from the type of ecosystems bio-geographers study. Every living organism exists in an ecosystem with a degree of mutual benefit, if not outright cooperation, across species. Some ecosystems are more open or closed than others. For instance, small islands are comparatively closed. On islands, unique species evolve and thrive, although islands support fewer species than continental environments and are vulnerable to external disturbance, competition and extinction events.
Keeping an ecosystem relatively closed for businesses enhances profits for the lead firms. Apple was very successful when it first launched the iPhone, thanks in part to a tight ecosystem that included the highly profitable iTunes application. And yet Apple Music (as it was renamed in 2015), has been outpaced by the rival Spotify, which is today by far the largest music streaming business. Record companies, not surprisingly, were more interested in their own revenues than giving Apple a monopoly on streaming.
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The ecosystem business model was meant to inspire me as an academic with a leadership role. Individual universities are part of an ecosystem. They can’t survive on their own and need collaborations with government, businesses, charities and other institutions. My geography department competes with others in the UK and overseas for students, research grants and reputation, and internally is ranked against other academic disciplines at King’s College London.
However, I don’t think a nature, red in tooth and claw mindset – which may aid businesses in becoming profitable or animals in surviving in the wild – is particularly helpful. I want to see geography as a discipline thrive everywhere, and I’m less concerned by my department’s relative position than the collective health of the sector, as well as my home university. If success for King’s Geography meant seeing another department collapse, I’d consider that a failure of the system.
My unwanted Nespresso machine might have been a profitable success for Nestlé and its partners, but fundamentally, we should think of that device as a form of ecological failure. After a few short years, it has become next to garbage. Disposing of this machine will have a real, negative impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.
