How Nespresso Builds Sustainability Into Its Business Model

Jean-Christophe Jaunin became CEO of Nespresso North America, the Nestlé unit that sells coffee brewing machines and capsules, on Jan. 1, 2026, after having served as global chief customer and technology officer. At the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business’s annual practice forum in March, MIT Sloan Management Review spoke with Jaunin about Nespresso’s commitment to sustainability. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How do you make sure sustainability targets don’t get sidelined as the pressure to deliver financial growth intensifies?

Jean-Christophe Jaunin: It’s the foundation of the quality we promise. Every time you’re drinking an espresso from Costa Rica, it will taste like Costa Rica. Yet the inputs — the soil in which the coffee tree grows, the environment — are changing rapidly. Sustainability here means going deeper into taking care of the soil, the climate, the environment in which the coffee grows, so that we can proactively manage change and future-proof our business.

More than 20 years ago, we started to identify the risk that conventional agriculture posed to coffee quality. Traditional farming practices were aimed at maximizing productivity. When mass production of coffee began, the thinking was to get rid of all other plants and just put in coffee trees. What happened is that the soil got poorer and poorer. Poor soil means drier beans, and the whole taste profile suffers. So we started putting back trees to see how a mix of different plants would stabilize the soil. Birds, insects, and other plants come back. This creates a new kind of compost that nourishes the soil, and by enriching the soil, the coffee quality gets better.

How do you convey the value of these changes to farmers who may be used to doing things the traditional way?

Jaunin: We need to create loyalty with them. The more than 150,000 families who are part of our Sustainable Quality Program are independent business owners who joined voluntarily. We have trained more than 600 agronomists to provide farmers with technical assistance and cultivate a direct relationship rather than going through brokers and intermediaries.

With traditional agriculture, if the coffee market was bad, there was nothing else. Now, with biodiversity, they have bananas, they have avocados. A couple of years ago, we partnered with expert beekeepers in Colombia and helped farmers put back beehives. The bees pollinate the coffee [plants], but they also create additional revenue for the farmers through honey. By giving farmers the chance to diversify their revenue, we create a more resilient economic model for them. And that resilience ultimately protects our supply.

Nespresso has taken on significant costs to manage the end of life of its aluminum coffee capsules. How do you justify that?

Jaunin: It is costly, but it’s core to our business model. We made the choice to use aluminum because it lets us vacuum-seal the coffee’s freshness for a very long time. In addition, aluminum can be recycled indefinitely. But because we made the choice to use this material, we need to take care of it.

There are more than 30,000 municipalities in the U.S., so we need to work with local authorities, regional authorities, businesses, recyclers, and composters. There’s the mail-back program, where we prepay the return for customers. In New York, we’ve invested in equipment at a waste management facility in Brooklyn that separates the aluminum from the coffee grounds so customers can simply drop capsules in the regular recycling bin. In Texas, we’re currently testing a pick-up-at-home model: The postal delivery person delivers your coffee and goes back with your empty capsules. It takes time and investment, but we are committed to ensuring 100% of our capsules can be recycled.