The first Lavazza Flagship Store opens in Milan offering coffee as never seen before

Milan, Italy (September 19^th, 2017) – Lavazza, the Italian coffee market leader and one of the industry’s major global players, inaugurates its first Flagship Store in the heart of Milan today. The store is a truly unique space, which has been designed to offer an immersive and innovative experience of the authentic world of Lavazza coffee. The essential everyday beverage, coffee, is presented at the space in a surprising new way, allowing customers to discover its original aspects as part of a multisensory experience that embraces tradition and innovation. This offering ranges from the classic Italian espresso to exclusive Coffee Design creations, to demonstrating the entire process of making coffee from the art of roasting to various extraction techniques. All different expressions with a single purpose: highlighting the quality and uniqueness of Lavazza coffee in all its forms.

The opening of the first Lavazza Flagship Store is part of a strategic plan that aims to illustrate the company’s expertise acquired over its more than 120-year history as well as the creativity it applies to the coffee experience.

“The opening in Milan, a city that has in recent years gained considerable global attention, is part of a wider-reaching international strategy with the important, yet challenging objective of helping to renew the brand’s image. This is the first phase of a process that will see the opening of new Flagship Stores in key markets for Lavazza,” commented Giuseppe Lavazza, Vice Chairman of Lavazza.

“We firmly believe in this project, which aims to give everyone the chance to experience the very best the world of Lavazza coffee has to offer. We will be surprising the public with brand-new Coffee Design products, developed thanks to our extensive expertise in experimentation in partnership with the top gastronomy world. All of this taking place in a venue where every element conveys the history and soul of a company that has always been committed to promoting authentic Italian coffee tradition with a constant eye on the future and innovation,” added Marco Lavazza, Vice Chairman of Lavazza.

In fact, this new coffee house embodies every aspect of Lavazza.

The contemporary Lavazza Flagship Store will welcome visitors and accompany them through a journey in discovering both traditional and new coffee drinking methods. All of this, found in four areas arranged around the focal point, an ovoid bar, whose style and colours evoke the raw ingredient, providing a stage for all possible coffee experiences within a unique atmosphere. Above the bar is a spectacular chandelier, designed as a scenic element to emphasize the magic of coffee. Its overall shape represents a large coffee bean, comprised, in its turn, by 640 beans in two different sizes.

Four areas, one central element: coffee

The journey through the world of coffee begins with surprising recipes offered in an area devoted to Coffee Design, expressing the brand’s innate vocation for creativity and innovation. Indeed, Lavazza created this discipline, in which cutting-edge food design meets coffee to create brand-new flavour combinations. Innovative Coffee Design products are the result of research and experimentation involving coffee, carried out by the Lavazza Training Centre and involving top international chefs. This has led to unique coffee creations presented to consumers for the first time in the Flagship Store. Like in a real cooking show, customers can watch the fascinating preparation process and taste some of the Lavazza Coffee Design recipes. Spectacular gastronomic innovations are created by playing with the element of coffee and artfully transforming it into creations like coffee foam, caviar, cocktails and unexpected solid products for new taste sensations, from breakfast to dessert.

The Freshly Roasted area of the store is devoted to discovering the art of roasting and blending, an all-Italian innovation introduced by the company’s founder Luigi Lavazza in 1895. Just like the first Lavazza’s grocery shop in Turin’s Via San Tommaso, high-quality fresh green coffee, sourced from coffee growers all over the world, is transformed using a special roasting machine. All this is done in full view of customers, who can try or buy selections of the best origins and blends handpicked by Lavazza. Devoted to the place that hosts the Flagship Store, the prized “San Fedele” blend containing three special origins from Ethiopia, Guatemala and El Salvador has been specially formulated by Lavazza’s master blenders for the people of Milan, and beyond.

In the Café area, customers can enjoy Lavazza’s exclusive premium coffee shop products, including prized special edition blends, organic Alteco and Kafa. These blends offer a unique journey from the North to the South of Italy by way of historic espresso recipes and local reinterpretations, all accompanied by special selections of handmade chocolates created by Guido Gobino for Lavazza.

Lastly, a space will also be devoted to the magical transformation of Slow Coffee a skill that coffee enthusiasts will be able to experience for themselves first-hand.

Espresso is the traditional interpretation of coffee. But it is not the only one. In fact, visitors to this area can see all the various extraction systems, from the syphon to the Chemex, the cold brew, the pour-over and the aeropress, without forgetting the beloved mocha pot. Different expressions with a single purpose: highlighting the excellence of the coffee origins and blends.

The Lavazza Flagship Store also serves as a “gastronomic café,” developed with the objective to represent the world of coffee in all its forms, along with exceptional food offerings that testify to the Turin-based company’s longstanding relationship with top gastronomy, which has been developed over twenty years. Lavazza’s ongoing commitment to excellence and experimentation is behind the development of the Flagship Store’s food menu which includes both sweet and savoury items that reinterpret traditional Italian cuisine in small-bite formats, using only the very finest ingredients. It is the ideal choice for a lunch break or a snack packed with flavours, developed around the central experience of coffee.

Designed by the acclaimed international firm JHP, the new Flagship Store is located in the historic Piazza San Fedele, a place in the heart of Milan that combines history and modernity. Iconic Italian style permeates the Flagship Store, from materials to finishes, thanks to partnerships between the Turin-based firm and some of Italy’s leading designers. In fact, interior design plays a key role, epitomized by the wonderful chandelier with its cascades of light formed by more than 600 pendants in the form of illuminated coffee beans, for an extraordinarily scenic effect. In addition, the interior stands out for the elegant and original designs by gourmet illustrator and food journalist Gianluca Biscalchin, whose subtle contemporary taste comes to life in some special installations on the walls and in other bright green details that recall coffee plantations.