Freshly roasted 200 Degrees coffee - pod style.
In a 200 Degrees first, we’ve launched Nespresso® compatible coffee pods. Here’s what you need to know.
Why coffee pods?
We want to make our coffee as accessible as possible.
For 10 years, our freshly roasted coffee has been available to buy as whole beans or pre-ground, but like our customers have been telling us - not everyone has barista-quality espresso machines at home. Nor does everyone use a cafetière or aeropress. For convenience and speed, loads of home brews are made using coffee pods (back in 2020 the Guardian reported that 400 Nespressos are drunk every second).
Fundamentally, we believe there is no right or wrong way to enjoy or brew your favourite coffee and that everyone should be drinking coffee in the way that works for them.
Show me the pods
Here’s what the pods look like:
(It’s the taste and quality of 200 Degrees, with the speed and ease of instant)
Each pack comes with 10 single-shot coffee pods and can they can be bought in value bundles of 30, 60 or 120 in the following two signature blends:
- Brazilian Love Affair Pods - inspired by the blend that we serve in all our own coffee shops.
- Mellowship Slinky Decaf Pods - creamy, sweet citrus and maple syrup.
What machines are they compatible with?
Our coffee pods can be used in any Original Nespresso® compatible machines.
We’re now also supplying two great Nespresso® Original machines on our website: the OPAL One and the Morning Machine. Both come with 30 FREE Brazilian Love Affair pods (our signature espresso blend).
What about coffee pod subscriptions?
You can get them delivered every week or every 2 or 4 weeks as part of our subscription service - just choose between 30, 60 or 120 pods.
Find out more here.
Can I get them delivered to work?
Our coffee pods are ready for your office kitchens; get them delivered home or to work (they’re also available for wholesale purchase - just get in touch). You can find all 200 Degrees coffee pods here.
Recyclable vs Compostable
From the beginning, there was a lot of deliberation around which material was actually best? Should our pods be compostable or recyclable?
Turns out this wasn’t an easy question to answer.
By definition, compostable sounded better but similar to what we learned when choosing the new packaging for our bags, this isn’t necessarily the case (how many people have access to the correct home-composting methods? Or even have a home compost bin?)
While recyclable and compostable pods had their upsides and downsides the only definitive thing we learned was that the perfect coffee capsule doesn’t exist (yet).
In the end we decided to go for fully recyclable aluminium capsules. For many reasons, we felt that this was the best option for our customers right now.
Why we chose recyclable aluminium pods
Some of our key reasons for choosing recyclable aluminium pods:
- Better taste – we did blind taste testing on over 100 different pods; there was an overwhelming majority that voted for aluminium pods as superior in taste
- Longer shelf life – without getting too technical, degassing is much quicker in compostable pods, meaning that the coffee loses its freshness much quicker
- Lower fail rate – pod machines work by piercing the front and back of the pod to filter the coffee through the machine. Because compostable capsules are weaker than aluminium, these are more likely to break down through this process (resulting in a wasted cup of coffee)
How can I recycle my coffee pods?
Recycling coffee pods hasn’t always been straightforward (the UK’s existing waste infrastructure isn’t set up to easily sort the plastic and metal inside most pods).
But during the project of creating pods we came across Podback - a brilliant nationwide recycling service that allows customers a simple and effective way of recycling their aluminium pods.
Now all our pod-users will be able to utilise their service by:
- Ordering an aluminium recycling bag from our website
- Filling bag with empty pods
- Dropping off bag to your nearest Collect+ store (6,500+ stores around the UK)
(After collection, Podback takes the pods to a specialist reprocessing plant in the UK)
There will be more information about our partnership with Podback soon - please sign-up to our newsletter to stay up to date on the latest news.
A note on sustainability
Sustainability in coffee is complex. Even though our pods are 100% recyclable, we don’t see it as the perfect solution and definitely don’t claim to be packaging experts. While we continue our own journey towards doing things a little better, we encourage all of our pod users to make use of Podback's recycling service.