South Korea’s food service company Hyundai Green Food Co. has released a pod coffee machine named h’_kaffee to ride on the rapidly growing capsule coffee market.

The food service unit of Hyundai Department Store Group developed h’_kaffee in partnership with a local original equipment manufacturing (OEM) company that produces pod coffee machines for Italian coffee firms Illy and Lavazza, it said.

The machine is compact and quiet, and compatible with the most popular Nespresso capsules. It also allows users to select eight different extraction modes. Hyundai Green Food has already sold 800 units of h’_kaffee mostly to offices in just two weeks since its launch and received pre-orders for 300 units, according to sources.

An official from Hyundai Green Food said the company believes h’_kaffee has a strong competitiveness in the burgeoning local capsule coffee market as the machine provides high performance at a lower price. It will aggressively target offices to market the machines as they would guarantee large volumes of sales in the long run. According to Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corp., the local retail market for pod coffees has been growing by more than 15 percent per annum since 2014.

The company’s decision to enter the capsule coffee machine market has also came after Dallmayr coffee pods it has imported from Germany and sold since last year have been well received in the local market.

By Lee Hee-soo and Choi Mira

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