Vittoria’s new coffee an instant hit for drinkers through lockdowns

The family behind Australian coffee maker Vittoria resisted creating an instant product until Covid-19 hit, driving more drinkers to try instant as cafes were closed.

Vittoria Coffee owner Les Schirato with his son Rolando Schirato. Picture: Richard Dobson

When Rolando Schirato started receiving pictures on social media of well-known chefs showing off Vittoria instant coffee in their pantries he knew he had won over not only key opinion leaders but also most likely a legion of invisible coffee snobs who ordinarily recoil at an offer of freeze dried coffee.

It helps to have the name Vittoria on the label, it adds a wealth of a 70 year history of coffee making in Australia, a third generation family owned coffee roaster that was able to attract Hollywood acting royalty Al Pacino to appear in an advert and declare to the camera “This is good coffee. Vittoria coffee.”

“Our philosophy is however people drink coffee we want to provide them with the best possible coffee they can find in that format, so if people are drinking instant coffee it is not about being a snob about it saying it’s no good, it’s just a different type of consumption,” Mr Schirato, the managing director of Vittoria Food & Beverage told The Weekend Australian.

“And what was funny as well is you would expect the feedback, from social media etc, from the supermarkets that it could be horrendous when you are entering instant coffee and it has been overwhelmingly positive. People were saying it is about time, we are so happy you guys are finally in instant coffee and a quite funny anecdote is, I would get photos from chefs of our instant coffee in their pantries.

“But it just indicates this, that instant coffee is multifunctional, people can enjoy it as well as pure coffee, it is not one or the other.”

The massive disruptions to the ordinary lives of consumers caused by Covid-19, retail closures and home lockdowns has run through the coffee industry like any other, but is probably more visible as crowds that once swarmed cafes and restaurants in cities are replaced by masked shoppers lining up outside at suburban cafes.

Covid-19 has similarly impacted in-home consumption. Locked in their homes, people are opting for coffee pods and roasted coffee, and buying better home coffee machines to brew them up, but also increasingly they are reaching for instant coffee.

That proved to be Vittoria’s perfect opportunity. It already had pure coffee and coffee pods, but now decided in the midst of a pandemic to introduce an instant coffee, entering with a 100g pack, that leveraged the strong Vittoria name that was the ‘go to’ coffee brand in cafes and top tier restaurants.

“That was always a fear, that it could be bad for the brand being in instant coffee and I guess where I got to on it was the cross over, it wasn’t just you were a pure coffee drinker or an instant coffee drinker.”

That switch from pure coffee to instant, sometimes back and forth in a day, was accelerated by Covid-19.

“When they shifted back home a lot of people were giving up that pure coffee consumption for instant coffee at home and so obviously people also upgraded their home coffee makers and things like that, but for a lot of it what we saw was instant coffee drinkers consumption growing and the research we were doing was they were dissatisfied by the current instant coffee offer.

“And so where it used to be a part of coffee consumption it was becoming a far more prominent consumption pattern of drinking instant coffee at home. But it was a mixed bag, you had some people who still had access to suburban cafes and still have that pure coffee experience but there were a lot of people relying far more on their home instant coffee.”

Launched in June at Woolworths, the first freeze dried instant coffee produced by Vittoria has been a hit, with Mr Schirato saying it has already captured a 24 per cent market share of the 100g category within Woolworths.

It has grown along with the segment, actually outpacing it, as instant coffee sales are up around 12 per cent since the pandemic and lockdowns began.

“Instant coffee was picking up but there was a level of dissatisfaction with current instant coffee and it’s an area we have had requests going back 50 years … you could probably find a quote of me saying we would never launch an instant coffee.

“When my grandfather came to the country instant coffee was all there was and we began roasting in the late 1950s and after my grandfather my old man spent a long time of his early career demonstrating pure coffee in supermarkets trying to encourage shoppers just to try real coffee, it was out of the box.

“Over the years we have had so many requests and steered away from it (instant) and focused on pure coffee aspects, but the quality of instant has definitely improved since the 1980s.”

Breaking into instant also made good business sense. Covid-19 had forced the shutdowns of its biggest customers, not just restaurants and cafes, but all that coffee sold at universities, airlines such as Qantas, hotels and other function centres where the Vittoria brand owned that space.

Actor Al Pacino enjoys a Vittoria coffee in New York in an advertisement for the Australian coffee company.

Mr Schirato is upbeat about the future of Australia’s cities and its stock of cafes and restaurants, despite the prolonged battle against Covid-19. He sees coffee consumption remaining strong, even growing, with changes to our way of life triggered by the pandemic – and expected to be lasting – simply pushing around where that coffee is consumed rather than pushing down volumes.

“There will be a shift in consumption – where you have it and how you have it. Once we are allowed to socialise more freely coffee is part of that social interaction, there might be more in the suburbs and it will move around,

“But overall coffee has grown, so consumption stays just the patterns shift. It won’t go back to how it was, there definitely will be some lasting changes for the foreseeable next few years I think.”

Originally published as Vittoria’s new coffee an instant hit for drinkers through lockdowns