How Nestlé Taught a Nation to Crave Coffee — And Why Most Founders Get the Lesson Backwards

In the 1970s, Nestlé had a problem it could not solve with a better product or a bigger budget: it could not get Japan to drink coffee. Japan was a tea civilisation — centuries of ritual, memory, and meaning brewed into every cup. Nestlé shipped in instant coffee, ran the campaigns, and watched it fail. The coffee was fine. The market simply did not want it.

So Nestlé did something unusual for a food company. It hired a psychoanalyst.

Clotaire Rapaille, a French child psychiatrist turned consumer researcher, ran his now-famous sessions: groups of Japanese consumers, soft music, and a single prompt — describe your earliest memory of this product. For tea, the memories poured out: a grandmother's kitchen, rain on the window, family. For coffee, there was nothing. No childhood. No warmth. No memory. Coffee did not exist in the emotional vocabulary of the Japanese consumer.

The Strategy: Don't Sell Coffee. Plant It.

Rapaille's recommendation was radical and slow: stop trying to convert adults who had no relationship with coffee. Instead, create the relationship — in children, before any aversion could form. Nestlé began making coffee-flavoured sweets and desserts aimed at Japanese kids: coffee candies, coffee jelly, coffee chocolates. Not to sell coffee. To seed the taste of it into the earliest, deepest layer of memory — the same layer where tea already lived.

Japanese children, with no inherited resistance, ate the sweets the way children eat any candy: with uncomplicated pleasure. An entire generation grew up with coffee encoded as a warm, familiar, childhood taste.

Then came the 1980s. The children who had grown up on coffee-flavoured treats entered the workforce. When Nestlé put instant coffee in front of this generation, the response was nothing like their parents' rejection — it was recognition. The taste was already home. Coffee consumption climbed for decades. Today Japan is one of the world's largest coffee importers, and Nescafé commands roughly 70% of its instant coffee market.

Now the Part Founders Get Backwards

Every founder who hears this story has the same reaction: "That is genius. That is what we need to do — educate the market, create the desire, play the long game." And for the overwhelming majority of them, that conclusion is exactly wrong, and expensively so.

The Nestlé story is celebrated because it is rare. It is survivorship bias in its purest form — one extraordinary, decades-long, deep-pocketed campaign held up as a template, when the truth is that almost no business is actually in Nestlé's situation. Nestlé faced genuine demand CREATION: a market with zero existing desire for the category. Almost every ₹10-50 Cr brand faces the opposite problem — demand CAPTURE: the desire already exists, buyers are already searching and buying the category, and the brand is simply failing to capture its share.

Mistaking capture for creation is one of the most expensive strategic errors at this tier. You spend years and crores "educating the market" and "building the category" for a product people were already ready to buy — while a sharper competitor skips the education entirely and just captures the demand sitting in front of both of you.

How to Tell Which Game You Are Actually Playing

Before you commit a single rupee to "educating the market," run these checks. They take an afternoon and they will save you years.

1. 1Is anyone searching for your category? If there is meaningful search volume for the problem you solve or the product type you sell, the desire exists. You are in capture, not creation. (Nestlé's tell was the opposite: nobody in Japan was looking for coffee.)
2. 2Are competitors selling the same category profitably? If others are making money selling what you sell, the market wants it. Your problem is share, not existence.
3. 3When you lose a deal, do buyers choose a COMPETITOR or choose NOTHING? Losing to competitors = the demand is real, you are losing the capture game. Losing to "we decided not to bother" = you may genuinely be early to a category.
4. 4Does your sales conversation start with "why this problem matters" or "why us"? If you have to convince people the problem exists, you may be in creation. If they already know they have the problem and are comparing solutions, you are in capture.

The Real Lesson Underneath the Coffee

Strip away the candy and the decades, and what Rapaille actually discovered is a principle that applies to every brand, in every market: when a product fails, the barrier is almost never the thing you are looking at. Nestlé thought it had a coffee problem. It had a memory problem. The instinct to fix the visible thing — the product, the price, the ad — is what keeps brands stuck, because the real barrier is usually invisible and upstream.

For a tea civilisation with no coffee imprint, the invisible barrier was the absence of desire, and the fix was creation. For a ₹15 Cr brand that "cannot scale," the invisible barrier is almost always somewhere in the seven business systems between the ad and the closed sale — and the fix is capture, done properly. Same discipline (find the real, invisible barrier); opposite conclusion (create vs capture). The expensive error is reaching for Nestlé's answer without first doing Rapaille's diagnosis.

The founders who win are not the ones with the most ambitious "category creation" vision. They are the ones honest enough to diagnose which game they are actually in — and disciplined enough to play that one well.