The E.S.E. System

In 1968, my father Ernesto Illy was already exporting his coffee to numerous European countries and he always encountered the same difficulty: people didn’t know how to turn his wonderful coffee into espresso. The grinding, his lifelong enemy, was always wrong and the coffee “ran”, resulting in...

The first patents for coffee packed in filter paper, something like a teabag, dated back to 1910 and had long since expired, but my father needed a machine… called a “pod machine”, to portion the ground coffee into these bags. He received it from an American, Cyrus Melikian (1920–2008), who went...

E.S.E. pods are available in: Café CrèmeEspressoRistrettoDecaffeinated

FrancisFrancis! produces the X1 Trio, which makes an excellent coffee or Café Crème with the E.S.E. pod, available in stainless steel and a variety of different colours.

E.S.E. pods are available in handy single-doses, which guarantee freshness until the moment of use, or in handy bags of 40 pods which offer a very low environmental impact.

E.S.E. pods – but not their outer packaging – are compostable, but to minimise their release of CO2, they have to be BURIED. Indeed, if you look at how nature breaks down a tree trunk that has fallen to the ground, you’ll notice how its weight is gradually reduced: the bacteria that cause its...