High-tech is letting Swiss coffee culture conquer the globe

Coffee specialist Jura combines coffee tradition with high-tech. And this makes the automatic coffee machines from the Greater Zurich Area more popular worldwide than ever before. IT skills and knowledge from the precision industry are behind this.

The easier something is for the user, the more engineering intelligence is required – a task that Jura has faced for more than 25 years as a manufacturer of automatic coffee machines. It has revolutionized the industry at its headquarters in Niederbuchsiten in the canton of Solothurn, where Jura employees are constantly developing one improvement after another. Operating their machines should be as intuitive as possible, and the quality and options should be as great as possible.

Says company spokesperson Meinrad Kofmel: “When we restructured our traditional company in the 1990s, we focused on what we do best: innovation, development, sales and brand management.”

The strategy worked. Right at the beginning of 1994, the new IMPRESSA 500 brewing system made history, and over five million units have been sold since then. In 2017, Jura sold more automatic coffee machines than ever before. And in American film productions, Jura machines are the stars of good taste.

Synergies in the region 

The automatic machines are high-tech devices. This has a lot to do with Swiss engineering skills and precision mechanics, both of which have always been present in the Greater Zurich Area. According to Meinrad Kofmel, the knowledge of an entire cluster in the region comes together for this, be it the design of the components, their micrometre-precise production or even their control.

“There are many synergy effects between our developers and partner companies,” says Meinrad Kofmel. The location is ideal, too, as the region is home to suppliers, important production experts and logistics specialists.

Innovation has a tradition

High-tech at Jura is also always in the interest of resource efficiency, which includes energy efficiency as well as a long service life. And when working on innovations, the developers draw inspiration from all possible areas: universities like the Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, supply the company with talent.

Says Meinrad Kofmel: “We have many employees who have been with Jura for decades. This means that knowledge from previous innovations isn’t lost and we can use the latest findings.”  As early as 2001, Jura launched the IMPRESSA F90, an internet-capable automatic machine. A world first, it allowed parameters to be downloaded from the computer to the machine and machine data to be sent to the service department. Today, the J.O.E.® app offers direct contact between the user, the coffee machine and the manufacturer. To make such developments a success, IT experts of the internet generation work hand in hand with Jura employees from the get go.

Be it an aromatic luxury such as 12 coffee specialities per touch display or automatic cleaning – all this belongs to a coffee culture that is as much appreciated in Asia as it is in South America. Wherever its machines are used, Jura is contributing to the reputation of Swiss coffee. And whoever uses them, experiences the same each time: while there might be a considerable amount of technology behind the machine, you get a cup of good, fresh coffee at just the touch of a button.