BeanScene Magazine

Nine kilometres. That’s the distance that determined Cosimo Libardo’s career, where he now finds himself as the Managing Director of Nuova Simonelli, one of the world’s leading espresso machine manufacturers.

Today Cosimo laughs as he recalls the little details that ended up having such a huge impact on his life.

“I guess you never really know where life’s going to take you,” he recalls. “You can’t really plan for these things.”

The story goes that Cosimo, having just finished a Master’s degree in international trade, was looking for an apprenticeship position. He came across a rule that said he could receive a living stipend from the government if his place of work was more than 80 kilometres from his home. While several shoe and leather factories skirted his hometown, he managed to track down the Nuova Simonelli office that was 89 kilometres from his house.

“I’d been studying for so long, I didn’t have any money. The stipend was something like the equivalent of 750 euros a month, that was a lot of money back then,” Cosimo recalls. “I took my old beaten up car and went to check out the factory, and it looked like a cool thing to do. Working with machines and coffee seemed more interesting than working with leather.”

Thus a few blocks distance marked the start of Cosimo’s career in espresso machines. After his initial internship at the company in Italy, he was sent in 1998 to the United States to study the American espresso market, travelling from Miami to Maine with airplanes and many Greyhound busses. Espresso culture was just taking off in the United States at the time, and Cosimo remembers meeting with Counter Culture and other pioneering US companies to discuss the rise of espresso.

Despite the presence of some high profile roasters, his conclusions, however, turned out pretty grim. What he found was that while espresso was gaining ground as a fashionable drink in the United States, it was in serious danger of falling out of fashion.

“In the US, most importers were selling espresso machines, but no one was providing any research, knowledge, training or service in the late 1990s,” he says. “While machines were easy to come by, there were countless machines that had long been abandoned due to poor service or minimal training for the owners. The conclusion of my thesis was that espresso had high chances of disappearing in America if it had remained just a fashion.”

His thesis proved well received, and the Italian Trade Commission later published it. With this success under his belt, following his apprenticeship Nuova Simonelli offered him a position with the company to be the sales and marketing link with their American office. Nuova Simonelli had opened its branch because it had identified that the market was controlled mainly by importers that had little interest in doing anything but sell machines, causing a poor reputation for service, although this was normal among most espresso machine manufacturers who had a presence in the United States. Cosimo’s research had a key role in identifying weaknesses and opportunities the market was offering at that time. He says there was a scary pattern companies had developed of not thinking beyond the initial sales.

“What I learned in the States is that you have to develop a program, not just a product,” he says. “Italian companies often had this attitude of: ‘I sell to you, you buy, you pay.” Cosimo says this was also his mindset when he began. He soon learned the hard way that it’s not how it works.

“You have to create steps. From my experience in the United States at that stage, I came to say: ‘You’re not selling a product, you’re selling a solution.’” 

Nuova Simonelli was interested in expanding their American presence, but wanted to do it consciously in accordance to the size of the market it had at that time. Shipping companies like UPS, however, made it easy to ship machines and spare parts within a matter of days. As such, there really wasn’t an excuse for poor service. There was a big opportunity for growth.

Using Cosimo’s conclusions from his thesis, the company started developing service plans for their American clients, fitting in with the kind of partnership arrangements United States’ companies were used to. The sale of a machine was only the beginning of a relationship, which would involve ongoing service and training.

As espresso culture grew in the United States, so did Nuova Simonelli’s business. In recent years Cosimo credits the American specialty coffee scene with helping to bring pockets of the American coffee culture to the world-leading reputation it has today. However, from his early experience in the country he largely credits Starbucks in the late 1990s for saving espresso culture in the United States from the destruction he had anticipated in his thesis, it’s something he calls “the Starbucks paradox”.

Cosimo believes two major changes were due to Starbucks: the “Americanisation” of the espresso culture, where espresso became not just some Italian import, but a part of the American identity. In addition to dipping espresso into the American melting pot, Cosimo credits Starbucks with helping to increase the price of an espresso from an 80-cent drink to $3.50, freeing up some cash for investment in the industry – and top of the line espresso machines like Nuova Simonelli’s.

And so it is that unlike many academics who stray far from their studies in their working life, Cosimo is probably a rare occurrence of someone who 14 years later is still applying what he studied. From his first work in the United States and Canada, Cosimo was called to expand his area of responsibility to serve as International Sales Manager for the company, and was eventually promoted to his current position of Managing Director, leading Nuova Simonelli’s strategy as they venture into new markets worldwide. 

What his studies hadn’t prepared him for was what he would encounter in Australia. He recalls his first experience with coffee in Australia when he was staying at the Crown Plaza: “I saw they were serving from a semiautomatic espresso machine, and as I ordered my cappuccino, I thought to myself: ‘This is going to be a disaster.’ Then I got my drink and it was actually good, with nice latte art: I couldn’t believe it.”

The more he explored Australian coffee culture, the more he was astounded at the quality of what was available.

“Espresso is almost everywhere in Australia, it’s even more prevalent than in Italy,” he notes. “I would say that the espressos and cappuccinos in Australia, on average, are served at the highest standards I have encountered in my travels. I think that Australians are the most spoiled for espresso-based drinks than anyone the planet.”

The more Cosimo explored the Australian market, the more he was amazed by the domestic coffee scene. He notes that the number of roasters compared to the Australian population is unprecedented: “I had to ask myself, ‘What’s happening here? This is gold – I think I like this place.’”

He credits much of Australia’s coffee culture naturally to the country’s Italian influence that has uniquely blended with other European and Anglo-Saxon coffee cultures, however he notes this isn’t sufficient to explain why the quality of Australian coffee is so high.

“In Australia, the focus seems to be on quality and craftsmanship, not just on marketing,” he comments. “In Italy, there is more competition and roasters are forced to use financial leverage to acquire customers in terms of the amount of equipment they need to lend out. In that kind of market, price becomes a big issue.”

Comparatively the Australian market, at least in the initial stages, had less competition, Cosimo says. Roasters have been able to focus more on quality, which then generates high standards for new entrants.

Nuova Simonelli started investing in Australia a while ago with a direct presence, but has recently opted to have a faster and better presence by working with a local partner based on the specific logistic situation. With the Australian market so widely spread geographically, it made more sense to partner with service and distribution companies who already had a presence. Nuova Simonelli now works closely with Espresso Mechanics for sales, service and training support.

As for the future of where global espresso trends are heading, Cosimo says he believes strongly in the values of World Coffee Events, the organisation responsible for organising the World Barista Championships, Latte Art Championships, Coffee in Good Spirits, Cup Tasting, Brewer’s Cup, and Ibrik competitions. Nuova Simonelli is coming to the end of its three-year agreement as official machine sponsor of the World Barista Championships, and is waiting for the decision if the sponsorship will be renewed. In those three years, the company has dispatched machines and personnel all over the world to support national and international competitions.

The kind of quality work that Cosimo sees emerge out of these competitions is where he envisions the market heading.

“When you look at the spread of the specialty market worldwide – it’s the companies who service this market who are going to survive,” he says.

Cosimo’s studies into the espresso market are never ending. Almost 15 years of working in the field have helped his ideas build even further.

“I used to say, we’re not selling a product, we’re selling a solution. Today the coffee market is under high pressures and is changing rapidly to the point that only companies that have a clear vision of the future are likely to adapt and survive. This is why solutions are not enough anymore, to be successful you have to sell ideas to your business partners, you have to believe in common goals.”