Access over 35 million academic & study documents

Evaluation of cafe pod

Content type
User Generated
Rating
Showing Page:
1/4
II. Internal Evaluation
Cafepods resources heavily rely on coffee and its products. The founders of cafepod identified a
possible gap or opportunity in the market when the patents that prevented the manufacture of
capsules that are compatible with Nespresso machines. The company has gone ahead to develop
their own unique products and holds patents to some products that are appealing to their customer
base. This includes their latest capsule that has incorporated the IML technology that the company
argues is the best in their line of products and promises to deliver the best tasting pod experience
ever. This business gap was propagated into a fully-fledged opportunity by the fact that the biggest
spenders on the coffee capsules are European coffee drinkers.
The patents that prevented the manufacture of capsules by other competitors was initially owned
by Nestle. By going into the capsule business and taking advantage of the patent expiry, cafepod
aimed at breaking the monopoly initially held by the coffee giant. The company founders, Peter
Grainger and Brent Hadfield were long time coffee enthusiast and therefore had no difficulty in
understanding the coffee space and consequently mobilizing their resources to satisfy the needs of
their target market. Cafepod has managed to attract investors in order to boost their resource
development. According to Rebecca (2015), the company sought £1.5M in growth capital.
Cafepod has also been able to mobilize their resources and tap into their fan base in the form of
coffee lovers so as to raise part of its funds through a crowdsourcing platform.
Cafepod is not the only coffee capsule start-up that took advantage of the Nestle patent expiry to
start their own coffee products line. This therefore means the it faces stiff competition from other
manufacturers and retailers including the already established Nestle and must consistently
innovate new ways of staying ahead of its competition. Kim et. al. (2015) describes resource-
based view on organizational growth as a framework that companies use to pick out or stablish
strategic and unique resources that can be used to gain a competitive advantage to the company.
Cafepod utilizes this model by innovating technology that enables them to produce coffee
capsules that offer superior taste but at a cheaper price compared to their competition. This
enables cafepod to lure in more customers and hence increase their customer base. In the same
spirit, cafepod has also been able to lure in investors with their active and rapid growth and
subsequently managed to raise £2M from a variety of angel investors. Most of the money that

Sign up to view the full document!

lock_open Sign Up
Showing Page:
2/4
cafepod is looking to raise will go into marketing its products and also expanding their
distribution networks to reach a wider market in Europe. Transient advantage as explained by
Kaharuddin et. al. (2017) aims to accept that competitive advantages are dynamic and short lived
and thus in line with the cafepod practice, a company should always be innovating and looking
for new advantages to stay ahead of the competition.
VI. Founder’s Input
Colombelli (2015) seeks to link the behavior and nature of senior level officials of a company
together with the founders to the direction the company takes. This includes the company’s
ability to grow rapidly and increase market share. In the case of cafepod, both founders of the
company, Peter Grainger and Brent Hadfield, ventured into a field they were familiar with. They
were both passionate about coffee and therefore they don’t just do it for the profits but it is
something they enjoy doing. This appeals the consumer market as they feel like they can trust the
cafepod products. Mr. Grainger goes ahead to say that the quality of the coffee they produce is of
utmost importance as customers like sampling. According to him before becoming regular
customers of a particular brand people actually want to taste the product first and first
impressions matter in retaining customers. This motivates them to be innovative and always keep
the customer experience in mind with every new product they launch into the market. Thus, they
have been able to retain and attract more customers evidenced by the strong revenue growth of
700% in two years according to Rebecca (2015).
The founders vision as illustrated by Taiwo (2016) plays a big role in the direction a company
takes and its overall growth and profitability. In the case of cafepod the founders are looking to
conquer the Western Europe market and they aim to do this by involving their customer base in
the company through numerous ways such as crowd funding. “With crowdfunding, you end up
with a pool of passionate, committed brand ambassadors,” says Mr. Hadfield. Cafepod founders
have steered the company in the right direction but they’ve also sought additional help from
already established corporate leaders. These include European CEO of Dermalogica, Steve
Kurland and the CEO and founder of Pure Gym, Peter Roberts. These two serve in the
company’s board of advisors. However, sometimes a fixed vision could result in stagnation of
the company’s growth and as such the founders of cafepod should be in a position to be flexible

Sign up to view the full document!

lock_open Sign Up
Showing Page:
3/4

Sign up to view the full document!

lock_open Sign Up
End of Preview - Want to read all 4 pages?
Access Now
Unformatted Attachment Preview
II. Internal Evaluation Cafepods resources heavily rely on coffee and its products. The founders of cafepod identified a possible gap or opportunity in the market when the patents that prevented the manufacture of capsules that are compatible with Nespresso machines. The company has gone ahead to develop their own unique products and holds patents to some products that are appealing to their customer base. This includes their latest capsule that has incorporated the IML technology that the company argues is the best in their line of products and promises to deliver the best tasting pod experience ever. This business gap was propagated into a fully-fledged opportunity by the fact that the biggest spenders on the coffee capsules are European coffee drinkers. The patents that prevented the manufacture of capsules by other competitors was initially owned by Nestle. By going into the capsule business and taking advantage of the patent expiry, cafepod aimed at breaking the monopoly initially held by the coffee giant. The company founders, Peter Grainger and Brent Hadfield were long time coffee enthusiast and therefore had no difficulty in understanding the coffee space and consequently m ...
Purchase document to see full attachment
User generated content is uploaded by users for the purposes of learning and should be used following Studypool's honor code & terms of service.

Anonymous
Just what I needed…Fantastic!

Studypool
4.7
Indeed
4.5
Sitejabber
4.4