(gentle music)
- Today we're gonna talk about a project
that is near and dear to my heart.
That is the Eagle One.
Now warning, gonna tell you right from the start.
This is a project that I've been involved in for years now,
from its inception.
I've been incredibly involved in it.
I would have been traveling the world
talking about it this year.
So I could not have more of a bias
and you should know that now.
But I think it's an interesting project
and I kind of wanna talk about it,
not necessarily about the machine,
but about the kind of bigger why of creating something new.
'Cause that's really an interesting question.
It's an interesting challenge.
If you build a new machine,
you start with a blank piece of paper.
You can build anything you want.
You can create any new technology you want.
So how do you pick?
How do you pick the things that are important?
How do you decide?
And that's kind of what I wanna cover.
And all of it for me starts with something pretty simple.
It starts with a design brief.
A design brief for me starts with an audience,
who you're building this for,
and then it's about identifying
a problem of theirs worth solving.
To me, innovation is that,
it's about solving a problem in a new way.
You can create new coffee machine technology
and go in search of a problem,
but that's not innovation.
That's more akin to me to novelty.
So I'm interested in innovation.
I'm interested in problem solving.
I worked with Victoria Arduino on this project
and I've worked with them or their parent company now
for quite a long time.
Nearly 10 years I think.
I got involved as a kind of a late addition
to the team that was developing and testing
the Mythos One grinder.
I then went on to work with them
on the Black Eagle Nespresso machine.
And this is the third project with them that I've worked on.
I think the Black Eagle is are pretty good example
of looking at an audience and try to pick a problem.
And with that machine,
the audience was the obsessives of specialty coffee.
People who understood how difficult it was
to do espresso incredibly well and incredibly consistently.
And they were people who'd been fighting
with little drip tray scales,
you know, breaking them all the time,
and just knowing what they needed
but having an issue in being able to have it.
And so the Black Eagle was very much built around
let's solve that problem.
Let's integrate scales into the machine.
Let's have it be incredibly stable, easy to control.
Let's have it look good,
that's kind of part of the process too.
But it was about solving a problem for that audience.
What I think is interesting is that audience has changed.
Specialty coffee has changed.
It's everywhere now.
It's in every city.
It's not just a kind of London thing,
Melbourne thing, Tokyo thing, New York thing.
It's every city.
It's most urban areas, it's small towns.
Specialty has spread everywhere.
And historically it had really been in consuming countries,
but now, well, that's changed too.
There are many producing countries
that have vibrant specialty coffee cultures
that are as interesting as anything anywhere in the world.
So it's a much, much, much broader umbrella.
The people who care about coffee, it's a much larger group.
And with a larger audience, well, that's good and bad.
It's unlikely that they will have shared problems.
But it turns out, I think,
that everyone has a little bit of a shared problem.
Everyone has something worth worrying about.
And I'm gonna use one word to define it.
And you might roll your eyes when you hear the word,
but I'll bring you back.
The word is sustainability.
I get it, I get it.
It's an overused word.
It's a word that is used to death.
But I just wanna use a very basic definition of it
to sort of focus on how I'm thinking about the problem.
The basic definition is the ability to sustain,
the ability to keep going.
Is it able to perpetuate itself?
And that's a challenge from a number of perspectives.
Two main ones, really.
The first place your brain probably went to
was the environment.
Our impact on the environment
makes our existence on this planet unsustainable.
And I'm not interested in arguing that.
But there is another kind of sustainability
that is very relevant to the coffee industry,
and that is financial sustainability.
Can the businesses that sell coffee to you every day,
that do a great job,
can they sustain?
Are they sustainable businesses?
And in both of those things, there's a common factor.
We are wasteful.
We are wasteful in a multitude of ways,
and that impacts the environment
and that impacts the health of the business
that is wasteful.
And I'm very interested in that particular problem,
being less wasteful.
And that became the big primary goal of this project,
how do we become less wasteful?
Now in the past we'd worked on energy efficiency,
but this time around
we were really able to push it forward quite a long way.
Going back to the Black Eagle,
the way that that thing heated water
was kind of interesting.
It was called a T3 system.
I'll be quick about this, don't worry.
You had a heat exchanger that kind of preheated the water
before it went into a brew boiler.
That brought it up to your desired brew temperature,
let's say 94 degrees Celsius.
And then the third stage of heating
was actually the grouphead itself.
In these machines,
the physical grouphead weighs about 4 1/2 kilos,
and they insulated it and put a heater inside it
and a thermocouple
so that would be maintained also at 94 degrees Celsius.
So between the boiler and the coffee,
there was no opportunity
for the water to be a different temperature.
And as a result you had a ton of consistency
and it was a very flat line in terms of temperature.
What we worked out relatively early, actually,
is that the temperature of the grouphead
is way more important than the temperature of the boiler.
Because you've got this 4 1/2 kilos of metal,
your brew water that you're actually gonna use,
well, it's only maybe 70 grams of liquid.
So even if it's slightly lower in temperature,
it'll absorb heat from that big thermal mass
of the grouphead
and it'll come up to the grouphead's temperature
before heating the coffee.
We took this as far as we could,
so we shrank the brew boiler down as small as we could.
It went from being about a liter
to down to like 150-200 mils.
The size of those disappointing cans of Cola
that you used to get on airplanes,
that who was ever satisfied by those,
those teeny little cans?
I'm sure you'll agree, a tiny amount of liquid.
And because you're not preheating the heater either,
this small boiler will take it from cold
to nearly perfect brew temperature
and then the grouphead kind of does the rest,
and you have in that a huge energy saving.
But for me, one solution is not enough.
You've got to look at an entire system
and see where else you can maybe gain something.
And there's little gains in funny places.
These machines all have an auto flush.
When you pull a shot,
if you take the grouphead out,
it will flush the exact minimum amount of water
necessary to clean the screen and no more.
Because I know over the years of being a barista
or sort of working on coffee bars,
I'll flush a grouphead between every single shot
but I will get distracted sometimes
and dump out way more water than I probably needed to.
And over the course of 500 drinks a day
you can waste staggering amounts of water.
In London, that's water that you've had to pay
to buy, firstly.
Secondly, you've had to pay to treat through reverse osmosis
which has quadrupled the price essentially.
And then you've paid to heat it up,
and then you've dumped it down a drain box.
It's a staggering waste of energy and it's so unnecessary
and this is where robots are better than people.
So I love that.
But we could go further still.
And this one is so ridiculous, but I completely love it.
We talked about the idea and then we tested it
and our minds were kind of blown.
Inside the drain box where all your hot water waste goes
there's a heat exchanger,
and it pulls the heat out of your drain box
and uses it to preheat your brew water.
There is no thermal waste here, or as little as possible.
It turns out you can get up to 8% efficiency
by doing it this way.
It started out as a kind of
this won't work but we should try it.
Wouldn't it be fun?
And it turned out to be really quite valuable.
Yeah, I can't benchmark against other name brands,
but against what I guess would be a popular choice
it uses about 1/3 less energy
to make the same number of drinks.
That's really I think a good indication
of what we're trying to do here
and the kind of thinking here.
Obviously parts inside a highly recyclable
and there's been a good amount of thought
on materials choice inside the machine.
The one other thing I wanna talk about just quickly
that I'm very passionate about as part of this machine
is a kind of part of the styling.
Now it's designed to look very clean, very minimal.
It's designed to look good on any coffee bar.
It's easy I think to build a machine
with almost too much character
that can look odd in a bunch of places
as much as it looks perfect in a bunch of places.
Really the goal here was to be as clean and as minimal
and actually as small as is possible
without compromising the kind of barista side experience.
But more than that,
people love to customize coffee machines.
And I get it.
It's a beautiful thing
and you can make it even more beautiful with customization.
The problem is you can easily end up spending
50% more of the cost of the machine
on customizing it.
And I don't think that's cool.
I don't think it should cost a fortune
to customize machines,
so we've built it with customization in mind.
Like the panels come off real easily,
they're really easy to replace with other materials.
The back panel isn't actually the back panel,
so you can use almost any material there
and not worry about heat or that kind of stuff.
So it's built to be super easy to cheaply customize
and give you a lot of flexibility about materials choices.
And people are kind of using some cool stuff,
some highly recycled stuff.
They're already having fun with that.
And there are other things that I wanna talk about.
I think it's good that we've gotten rid
of mechanical steam valves
and then have electric solenoids.
I think there's better longevity, easier to change.
It's a different experience,
but I think a better experience ultimately.
I don't wanna get into like a specs list
or a features list or that kind of stuff.
I wanna talk about what we're trying to do
and why I'm so concerned about that.
Because even before the pandemic
sustainability was and quite rightly was
a big topic of discussion,
and that's both environmental as well as financial.
The coffee industry became a target
for governments around the world, really,
as a focal point of waste.
You know, the paper cup wastes story
ran and ran and ran all over the world.
No one talks about the amount of paper waste
generated by online delivery.
But hey, look at coffee shops, look how messy they are.
It was a concern, and it's a fair concern.
I think it's disproportionate,
but it's still a fair concern,
but that's just one piece of that.
But alongside that we were already at a point
of massive financial pressure.
There were way too many coffee shops around the world,
that was way too much competition,
and surviving was gonna be difficult.
And then you laid a pandemic across that
and survival became incredibly difficult
for almost everyone in the market.
I've said this before
and it'll probably continue to be true.
It's never been harder to run a coffee shop than it is now.
But I want people to succeed,
and so I'm very interested in working towards building tools
that help businesses succeed.
A machine should have everything you need
to serve great coffee
and kind of nothing more.
It should be as efficient as possible,
but you don't wanna add so many features
that you start to bloat the price,
because I've heard loud and clear
from people in many producing countries
who feel they're kind of priced out of coffee innovation.
The most interesting coffee machines
are often the most expensive,
and that might work,
that might work in London or LA or Melbourne,
but maybe it doesn't work as effectively
in Jakarta or Mexico City.
Working kind of remotely on a project like this
is interesting.
I would travel to Italy occasionally
and we'd look at prototypes
and we'd argue about panel sizes
or how to shrink a grouphead
or get a display into the grouphead
and have it look really good.
Angles of steam ones, all of that kind of stuff.
And then I would go away and they'd build things
and I'd come back and it would evolve in that kind of a way.
And honestly, they're doing all of the hard work.
I would just come in and get to complain for a little bit
and they'd be very tolerant of me
and then I'd leave again and we'd continue.
It's a strange journey
but I'm very pleased with the result.
So that's the Eagle One project.
It's been a lot of fun.
We launched it last year as part of Design Week
in the Saatchi Gallery in London
and that was a cool event to get to do.
And then obviously we took it to Host in Milan
where most people saw it for the first time.
And obviously it's been a weird year this year,
but it's just been very exciting
to bring something to market.
But that's all I wanna say.
I just wanted to talk about the process
and the thinking behind creating something new
because I think that is an interesting topic,
and I hope that you found it interesting too.
But I would love to hear thoughts.
Did I miss something as an opportunity for innovation?
Did I misread the market?
Do you think a different approach would have been better?
Do you think a pandemic has moved our minds
away from sustainability
or has focused it further onto it?
Have you got one?
Are you enjoying it and having a good time?
I would love to hear from all of you
down in the comments below,
but for now I'll say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.