illycaffè

illycaffè's own company history credits Francesco Illy, a Hungarian-born émigré who settled in Trieste after arriving from Vienna at the end of the First World War, with founding the company in 1933 on the stated ambition of making the best coffee in the world. Two years later, in 1935, Illy built the illetta, a machine historians of espresso equipment regard as the blueprint for the modern espresso machine — an early attempt to mechanize and standardize what had been a manual, inconsistent brewing process. Illy separately patented a pressurization system for packaging roasted coffee, a method the company still uses today and one that, per its own account, enabled its first exports to Sweden and Holland in the 1940s by keeping beans fresh over long shipping distances. The brand is now B Corp certified, runs an internal Università del Caffè training program, and sells the illy Art Collection — coffee cups designed by contemporary artists — alongside its standard espresso, capsule, and whole-bean lines. The throughline from Trieste in 1933 to the current catalog is engineering: illy's identity rests less on a single origin story than on solving the mechanics of consistent espresso, first with a machine, then with packaging.