Ten weeks after the arrival on the shelves of stores of its nearest competitor, Nespresso is on the offensive … judiciary. Nestle, the world leader in food and owner of Nespresso, sued Friday in front of the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris the U.S. Sara Lee, which sells in France for use in coffee pods Nespresso machines under the brand Gold ( coffee house).
According to our records, Casino is also covered by this assignment, as distributor caps Gold. However, neither Carrefour or Leclerc or Auchan, which also sell, have received blue paper. Nestle has obviously wanted to spare its main customers in France.
In fact, the Swiss Casino attacks because it sells, in addition to pods Gold, its own brand caps, also compatible with Nespresso machines.Available for less than one month, they were designed by CSC, a company founded by a former boss of Nespresso, which claims to have found a way around the patents by the Swiss group. The best advertising we could do that Nestle would drag us to court, "repeated John Paul Gaillard, head of CSC. The latter will have to wait to see if it will receive such a boost from his former employer.
1700 patents
Nestlé experts (engineers, mechanics, lawyers), which took ten weeks to complete their technical analysis of the capsules, however, have not yet completed its review of those Casino."This assignment is a clever shot pool with three bands, according to a avocat.Casino will prepare his defense for Gold, while avoiding having to contradict itself in any future case."
Nestle has taken the risk of him a (bad) publicity to defend its brand and its margins."We welcome fair competition, the company said, but we will take all appropriate measures to defend our intellectual property rights."
With the Nespresso coffee machines tailored to accept (in theory) that caps his coffee house and sold exclusively in a distribution network owned, Nestle has a nugget that was made last year a number of business by 1.94 billion euros (up 22%) and whose profitability, kept secret, is close to levels recorded in the luxury industry.
The 1700 patent cover both Nespresso pods, machines, and the mechanism that provides the link between the two. The assignment of Sara Lee would focus on these last two points, not the pods themselves. While those of Nespresso, aluminum, are completely sealed, those of Gold, plastic, are already holes.The panel discussion promises to be tricky. Pending the outcome of the proceedings, which could take 12-18 months (unless an agreement was reached earlier), provides Nespresso not have noticed the slowdown in its rate of growth since the arrival of new competitors. Sara Lee and sell between 1.1 and 1.5 million capsules of coffee … ten to twenty times less than Nescafe.
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