The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2024
Nescafé's '80 Degrees' turns the 80°C brew recommendation into a global ritual
Nescafé makes energy saving feel like a worldwide coffee ritual: brew at 80°C, not 100°C, across 5,700 cups a second.
Nescafé
What it had to solve
Nescafé is the third most-drunk beverage in the world, with 5,700 cups brewed every second, and every cup has an energy impact. The drink is recommended with water at 80 degrees rather than boiling at 100 — it tastes better and the 20-degree difference saves energy worldwide — but an instruction alone would not change the habit.
How it works
Nescafé is the third most-consumed beverage in the world, and 5,700 cups are brewed every second, so even a small change in how each cup is made carries global impact. The brand's brewing guidance is to use water at 80 degrees rather than boiling at 100: the coffee tastes better and the 20-degree difference saves energy everywhere.
The campaign's creative move was to stop treating that guidance as a technical instruction. A film shot on Kodak in Madrid collected kettles from around the world to show there is no single way to perform the 80-degree ritual, and pictured different cultures enjoying their Nescafé at the cooler temperature.
By celebrating the variety of kettles and rituals rather than prescribing one method, the work made energy saving feel like participation in a shared global coffee culture. The 20 degrees stopped being a sacrifice and became the mark of a properly made cup.
The film is archived on D&AD as an example of the campaign. The page describes the idea and credits Spy Films as entrant and production company, with Hawai Films also in production, but records no quantitative energy or sales outcomes.
Why it lands
- It reframed an energy-saving instruction as a sensory, cultural ritual, giving people an immediate personal payoff — a better-tasting cup.
- Anchoring the message in Nescafé's own scale (5,700 cups a second) made a 20-degree difference feel globally significant, not trivial.
- Showing kettles from different cultures said 'there is no single right way', so no audience was lectured or excluded.
- The taste benefit carried the environmental message: consumers adopt the habit for their own cup first, and the energy saving follows.
What it did
The campaign converted an environmental instruction into a positive, cultural ritual: instead of being told to boil less, viewers are shown a spectrum of kettles and brewing habits, each at 80 degrees. The film made the energy saving concrete by tying it to Nescafé's own scale — 5,700 cups a second — and is preserved in D&AD's awards archive; the source page records no energy or sales figures.
What you can take
To change a mass habit, give the new behavior a positive identity instead of a warning: a ritual people want to join beats a rule people feel they are breaking.
Since then
The D&AD archive page records the campaign but no energy, sales or behavioral figures, so the case rests on the idea: an instruction about water temperature turned into a warm, global ritual worth celebrating on film. Its transferable point is that the same 20-degree message could work as an identity — 'the 80-degree ritual' — rather than as a demand to change.
Sources
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