Continuing to rejuvenate its ranges, Café le lion is reinvesting this month in the Dolce Gusto pre-dosed segment that it abandoned a year ago. Completely redesigned, innovative in its fragrance offering, spread with tea and chocolate, the new offering from the historic Reunion brand gives a festive air to coffee tasting.
The general manager of Café le lion, Gerard Gillet, had announced, in the last quarter of 2021, an initiative on pre-dosed products aimed at complementing the strategy of innovation and presence in all coffee segments deployed by the local brand. This is done with the launch in May of a Café le lion range of Dolce Gusto capsules. The historic roaster péi reinvests in the Dolce Gusto capsule segment, one of the most buoyant currently on the coffee market, that he left a year ago. Produced by Krups, a brand of the SEB group, Dolce Gusto machines, are very popular in Reunion where they satisfy a need for modernity at an affordable price. Interviewed in April 2021 by Leader Réunion, Safi Bendhamane, Export Director DOM-TOM of the SEB group, cited a local fleet of more than 55,000 machines ! The new Café le lion offer no longer has anything to do with the old one. It offers a wide choice of perfumes which give pride of place to local flavors. Next to classic cafes, Café le lion highlights typical flavors, and even unique, like ginseng coffee and pistachio coffee... There is also hot chocolate and lemon tea, another first for the lion.
Café le lion Dolce Gusto is a real eye-catcher
To stand out even more, the Reunion brand combines, to the pleasure of taste, the pleasure of the eyes. Café le lion wows us by taking the ordinary packaging of cubic boxes of capsules out of its banality.. Full of life and colors, its decorations have the right tone of today’s Meeting. On-shelf visibility level, difficult to do better. At home, the Dolce Gusto Café le lion cube becomes a fun decorative element. “Coffee is a product that is both traditional and modern, and Café le lion is a Reunion brand that is both faithful to its roots and in line with today’s expectations” explains Gérard Gillet, general manager of café le lion, which situates the issues of the strategy : “Our dynamic of innovation has supported our growth in the complicated period that we have just experienced with the health crisis. It should now allow us to better cope with the significant additional cost of our raw materials., which we unfortunately had to fully pass on in our prices, due to the small size of our structure. This problem affects the entire local economy. But it is together with the people of Reunion that we intend to pass this milestone ! »
The lion projects into the future
Local reference in roasted beans with a very wide offer, Café le lion has just enriched its range of world coffees with a Nicaraguan Origin. Café le lion is also active in the declining ground segment, which remains its stronghold. Its family formats and, entry level, the Kafé Koulé brand, integrated into the Quality Price Package, did well in 2021. Other success : the project of linear boxes allowing immediate identification of the Café le lion offer on the shelves. Fifteen facilities are in place to present the ground and grain ranges, pre-dosed products remaining in their product family. One of the objectives for 2022 is also to invest more in CHR. To wholesalers, Café le lion now offers its Sélection du Monde range in 1 kg format. However, the next big news from the Reunion brand will undoubtedly be its new factory. : Café le lion's long-standing project to leave its cramped premises at the Port for a new industrial site should come to fruition at the end of the year.
