At the other end of the chain, among those who roast and sell, concentration is stronger still than in trading.

In 2015, the top four roasters made about 40% of the world sales of coffee consumed at home. That same year, the merger of Mondelez's coffee businesses with Douwe Egberts created the world's number two, JDE.

In France, the movement is even clearer. In 2008, three multinationals concentrated 70% of at-home sales: Kraft Foods, Nestlé and Sara Lee. In 2017, they account for 80% of them, and they are no longer quite the same: Nestlé, JDE and Lavazza.

The number of dominant players has therefore not moved, but their grip has gained ten points in nine years.

Private labels, for their part, accounted for 30.6% of volumes in supermarkets. This figure does not contradict the previous one: it is counted in volumes, whereas the 80% is counted in sales.

Out of home, Starbucks alone represented 21% of the estimated world market. Which explains why in 2018, Nestlé paid 7.15 billion dollars to Starbucks for the mere right to sell its products in grocery and foodservice outside North America. The deal proved a good one: sales under this license reached 3.6 billion Swiss francs in 2022.

The latest move dates from yesterday. On August 25, 2025, Keurig Dr Pepper announces the acquisition of JDE Peet's.

JDE Peet's carries Jacobs, L'Or, Douwe Egberts and Peet's, and weighs 9.9 billion euros of sales in 2025. The price offered is 31.85 euros per share, which gives an enterprise value, that is, the price of the shares plus debt, of about 23 billion dollars.

The buyer announces in the same move its intention to subsequently spin off a global coffee group. The coffee it is buying is therefore not meant to stay where it lands.

As of April 1^st, 2026, the offer had gathered 96.22% of the shares. At this level, the operation is no longer a plan, it is done.

Concrete consequence, and it is worth pausing on: the coffee of Jacobs, Maxwell House and Peet's is now decided from Burlington, Massachusetts.

BASIC 2018, pp. 6-7 (after Euromonitor); World Coffee Portal, 2023, and Fortune, May 7, 2018 (Nestlé-Starbucks); Keurig Dr Pepper, press releases of August 25, 2025 and April 1, 2026; CNBC, August 25, 2025 (accessed Sept. 7, 2026)

Added value has shifted with the format, and France gives the clearest case.

Portioned coffee, that is, capsules and pods, accounted for 48% of the coffee consumed at home in 2012, then 58% in 2017. That weighs 1.2 billion euros in mass retail, to which are added about 800 million of Nespresso sales in boutiques and online. This is what makes France the world's leading market for portioned coffee per capita.

The shift can be read in a second figure. The added value created in France by roasted coffee more than doubled between 1994 and 2017, from 1.2 to 2.6 billion euros.

Making and transporting these new formats costs more, that is true. But not on the same scale: this extra cost is estimated at 310 million. The additional spending therefore explains only a small part of the gain.

The same logic can be read at Nestlé. The group reports for 2025 a mid-single-digit growth in its coffee, driven by prices, that is, by what it charges rather than by quantities sold. Soluble Nescafé is the leading contributor. The category of powdered and liquid beverages, which houses Nescafé, Nespresso and the Starbucks license, grew 7.3% organically. This last word means excluding acquisitions and excluding exchange-rate effects.

BASIC 2018, pp. 6, 9; Nestlé, Full-year results 2025 (nestle.com, accessed Sept. 7, 2026)