[H]ost2015, held as always in Milan, was an opportunity for companies across the hospitality industry to showcase their latest or future products that have the chance to change everything from gelato making to pizza baking to, most importantly to us, coffee. With more than 150,000 attendees, most of them dealers and sales reps from across the globe, there’s not another trade show that can send out word of new tech faster.
Fresh Cup was brought to the show by Host to see the goods. Here are three companies showed products you’re bound to see in a café near you.
Mahlkönig
While the German grinding giant was making the European debut of its Pulse grinder, the great tease was the prototype of the EK43 Barista. In its unfinished form, the successor to coffee’s greatest unintended success (the EK43 was designed decades ago to grind spices before being repurposed by baristas) was presented with a variable speed dial and second adjustment dial to make even finer grind calibrations. The machine might (maybe) see production next year.
Sanremo
This is an espresso machine company you’ll see popping up in American cafés soon. Sanremo has been around for decades, but only in the nineties did it start making decent machines. Over the past few years, they’ve decided to fight their way into espresso’s top tier. They recently opened a headquarters in the US and have a high-end machine, the Opera, that they built to duke it out with the likes of the Black Eagle and Strada. A variable speed grinder that can toggle between three hoppers of beans is in prototype phase. Whether or not it sees production in its current form, it shows a company pushing itself.
Dalla Corte
No longstanding company made a bigger scene than Dalla Corte, stepping into HOST with a new brand identity and a next-generation espresso machine, the Mina. A quick look at Dalla Corte’s old and new websites is enough to show the direction the company wants to take its image. Maybe more surprising was that the Mina was unveiled as a single-group machine. Most espresso machine companies left their single-group models at the warehouse, so a line of little machines was eye-catching. The Mina will come out early next year.
—Cory Eldridge
