How Coffee Conquered Switzerland: 400 Years of Coffee History

June 5, 2026 Last updated on June 5, 2026 Joscha Gewinner

Wie Kaffee die Schweiz eroberte: 400 Jahre Kaffeegeschichte

Quick overview

The first known Swiss coffee drinker documented his experiences in Istanbul as early as 1612.
For a long time, coffee was a luxury good in Switzerland and was even temporarily banned.
Swiss milk coffee originally developed from coffee substitutes and plenty of milk.
Coffee houses were important meeting places for merchants, politicians and intellectuals.
With Nescafé, Nespresso and the fully automatic coffee machine, Switzerland invented several milestones in modern coffee history.
Today, Switzerland is one of the most important locations in global coffee trading.

From Ethiopia to Europe

When the first printed reports by European travellers to the Orient about the still entirely unfamiliar coffee reached Europe more than four hundred years ago, roasting, grinding and brewing the beans with hot water had already been widespread for decades in the Islamic centres of the time. The coffee plant originally came from Ethiopia. According to legend, the herder Kaldi was the first to discover coffee’s stimulating effect when his goats could no longer be calmed after eating coffee cherries. The first mentions of coffee date back to 900 AD and come from the Kaffa region in Ethiopia, from which coffee takes its name.

However, it took another 500 years for coffee to make its way across the Red Sea to neighbouring Yemen, where it was first cultivated agriculturally. With the beginning of coffee cultivation from 1400 AD onwards, coffee consumption spread rapidly across the Middle East. The first coffee houses probably appeared in Cairo or Syria. Islamic pilgrims encountered them on their journeys to Mecca and other holy sites and brought the custom of drinking coffee back to their home towns. This also happened in Constantinople, which came under Ottoman rule in 1453 and was called Istanbul in everyday usage by its new inhabitants. The first coffee houses appeared there in the first half of the 16th century.

Historical Dutch copper engraving of the Yemeni port city of Mocha, with sailing ships on a stormy sea in the foreground and a detailed city view. — Image: Copper engraving by Olfert Dapper (1636–1689) of the Yemeni port city of Mocha, first published in 1680. Until 1711, the city on the Red Sea held the trade monopoly on coffee. Then the first large shipment of coffee from Java reached the Amsterdam market.

Coffee house culture in the Islamic world emerged at a time when Europeans were caught up in a spirit of discovery. This spirit was fuelled not least by Christopher Columbus’ journey to the New World. The end of the Late Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period were marked by curiosity about foreign countries, cultures and customs. Travelogues published in books became increasingly popular because they gave those who stayed at home a previously inaccessible glimpse into other worlds.

It was in such travelogues that the coffee customs of the Islamic world were first introduced to a European audience. The Augsburg city physician and botanist Leonhart Rauwolf was the first European to describe the custom of drinking coffee in his travel report, published in 1582. He had observed it in the coffee houses of Aleppo in Syria: “Chaube von inen genennet das ist gar nahe wie Dinten so schwartz”.

The Swiss, too, first learned through a travel report about what was perceived as the strange Turkish custom of drinking black, hot water during lively conversations in inns created specifically for that purpose. It was Johann Jacob Ammann, from a respected family of barbers in Thalwil near Zurich, who in 1612, shortly before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, was allowed to accompany an Austrian imperial delegation to Istanbul as a surgeon.

Johann Hans Jacob Ammann from Thalwil, the first Swiss visitor to a coffee house — Image: Johann Hans Jacob Ammann was the first Swiss person to report on coffee drinking in Istanbul’s coffee houses in 1612. (Source: Wellcome Library no. 658001i)

His written account of his “journey to the Holy Land”, including the episode about the “other inns” of the Turks, where the innkeepers supposedly served their guests nothing but “black water”, even earned the celebrated returnee citizenship of the city of Zurich. Ammann’s good fortune, however, did not last long. In the strictly religious Zwinglian city on the Limmat, his differing theological views and absence from church services caused displeasure, eventually leading to the withdrawal of his citizenship. Nevertheless, the man from Thalwil secured a firm place in the history books of coffee with his early writings about the coffee houses of Istanbul.

Image: This miniature from the second half of the 16th century shows a typical Ottoman coffee house of the period. Ammann from Thalwil may have visited one like it in 1612. (Source: The Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, Inv. No. 439, fol. 9a.)

The first traces of coffee consumption in Europe can be found in Venice in the 1630s. While the countries north of the Alps became increasingly entangled in the conflicts of the Thirty Years’ War, Venetian apothecaries began selling coffee in the lagoon city, probably after acquiring it from Ottoman merchants.

It was no coincidence that apothecaries were the first to offer green coffee. The Venetians hoped that drinking coffee would have healing effects, for example on the stomach. The idea of healthy coffee was popularised by the physician and professor of botany Prosper Alpinus from Padua, whose illustration from 1592 was the first drawing of the coffee plant ever made in Europe.

Gradually, however, coffee became increasingly appreciated as a beverage of pleasure. The first coffee house on European soil opened in 1645 on St Mark’s Square in Venice, a precursor to today’s Café Florian, and was initially a meeting place for international merchants. Five years later, the first coffee house in England opened in Oxford. But it was the establishment opened two years later in London that set a movement in motion, resulting in many more openings in London and other European cities, including Marseille in 1659, Amsterdam and The Hague in 1663, Paris in 1672 and Bremen in 1673.

Swiss people living abroad had a decisive influence on the spread of coffee house culture in Europe from very early on. After the Three Leagues, a free state in the area of today’s canton of Graubünden, rejected Venice’s proposal to expand the trade routes between the Alpine passes of Graubünden and the lagoon city, the people of Graubünden lost all the privileges they had previously been granted.

In 1666, around 3,000 people from Graubünden therefore had to leave the city of Venice. They had worked there as confectioners, brandy sellers and scissor grinders, and had partly dominated these trades for generations. After their expulsion, they dispersed across Europe, opened coffee confectioneries in numerous cities and shaped coffee house culture across large parts of the continent, from Porto to Odessa and from Copenhagen to Palermo.

Refugees bring coffee house culture to Switzerland

It took only a few more decades for the coffee trade to reach the inland cities of today’s Switzerland. Via the Rhine and the Rhône, Basel and Geneva were connected to the most important hubs of the coffee trade at the time, Amsterdam and Marseille. The first coffee houses are documented in surviving dance bans in Basel around 1695. Official mandates in Geneva suggest that coffee was being traded in large quantities in French-speaking Switzerland by around 1700 at the latest. While merchants delivered the coffee beans to Switzerland, Protestant refugees from France brought coffee house culture to the Confederation.

In the 1680s, tens of thousands of Huguenots fled to Switzerland or passed through it on their way to other countries. Between 1683 and 1710 alone, more than 40,000 religious refugees are said to have passed through Zurich. By comparison, the city on the Limmat had only around 12,000 inhabitants at the time. The Huguenots proved to be a true blessing for the cities and regions between Lake Geneva and Lake Constance. With their valued craft skills, they revitalised the textile and watchmaking industries and established the first coffee houses, for example in the city of Bern around 1693.

Coffee bans, high prices and the origin of Swiss milk coffee

At the beginning of the 18th century, coffee had a difficult position in Switzerland’s estate-based societies. In addition to the dance bans already mentioned in Basel, the authorities in other cities also tried to restrict the coffee custom in inns, coffee houses and guild houses. In Bern, people feared a harmful influence on young people and forced many Huguenot coffee houses to close because guests had exchanged the news of the day there. The city of Lausanne, which had been under Bernese rule since 1536, also had to close several coffee houses around the turn of the century under pressure from its rulers.

In Zurich, coffee consumption was repeatedly restricted from 1701 until Napoleon’s conquest of Switzerland in 1798. Coffee was not allowed to be served at official occasions such as weddings or other gatherings in inns and guild houses. What was particularly disapproved of was the display of luxury consumption, which was seen as incompatible with the values of the Zwinglian spirit of the time.

Despite all these efforts, coffee bans were rarely enforced successfully in Switzerland. Quite the opposite. The annual per capita consumption in the city of Zurich in 1778 probably did not reach the 6.7 kilograms of coffee beans claimed by the contemporary socially critical pastor Johann Heinrich Waser. But considering that at the time the price of one pound of coffee was roughly equivalent to a simple craftsman’s daily wage, it is easy to imagine that Zurich’s city dwellers were willing to pay quite a lot for their three cups of coffee a day.

The new coffee custom spread to the countryside through textile publishers, cloth merchants, servants and carters. Despite initially high prices, coffee consumption gradually spread among the rural population, first in wealthy areas such as the Bernese Mittelland, later also in the Bernese Jura and in the cantons of Lucerne, Schwyz and Thurgau. Only from the 1830s onwards could the people of Ticino slowly begin to have a say in coffee consumption. By then, two hundred years had already passed since Venetian apothecaries first brought coffee to the European market.

The coffee of that time can hardly be compared with what is found in a cup today. Wealthy urban citizens drank it much thinner, using five to six grams per cup. By comparison, today a cup of filter coffee with 200 millilitres of water is usually prepared with two to three times as much ground coffee.

In the countryside, by contrast, the coffee served in the late 18th and 19th centuries consisted almost exclusively of stretched coffee or substitute products intended to taste like coffee. Chicory, turnips or acorns, for example, were collected, shelled, roasted and ground into powder.

When drunk black, this substitute coffee tasted very bitter. Plenty of milk was therefore added to make it reasonably palatable. This “milk coffee” became a fixed part of the typical farmer’s breakfast from 1800 onwards and contributed to a healthier diet, replacing the schnapps or sour wine that had previously been served with millet or oat porridge.

By the end of the 19th century, this preparation had become so deeply rooted among the rural population that many foreign travellers noticed “milk coffee” as a Swiss peculiarity. Pure bean coffee was served only rarely, for example on holidays or when visitors came, and even then very sparingly. In the 19th century, four coffee beans per person were considered the norm.

Coffee houses in Zurich

Coffee house culture became established in Zurich rather late. The oldest evidence comes from a French-language travel guide to Switzerland from 1796, which mentions a café in the Zipfelhaus where national and international newspapers could be read, a little more than two years before Napoleon’s conquest of Switzerland.

During the periods of Restoration and Regeneration after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which ultimately led to the founding of the federal state in 1848, the population became increasingly politicised and split into conservative, liberal and liberal-radical camps. It was no coincidence that the city experienced a real boom in new coffee houses during these phases, places where travellers met Zurich residents, exchanged news and engaged in political agitation. In a time when there were no libraries or other public reading rooms, coffee houses served as places of education and information exchange.

The image “Zurich at Weinplatz” by Johannes Ruff (ca. 1835) shows, among other things, the Café zum roten Turm (Café Littéraire), which was located next to the Hotel Storchen and was later demolished. — Image: View of Zurich’s Weinplatz, painted around 1835 by Johannes Ruff. The Café Littéraire was located in the eight-storey building next to the Hus am Storchen. (Source: Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Graphic Collection and Photo Archive.)

At the Café du Commerce in the Zunfthaus zur Saffran on Limmatquai, where conservative forces gathered from the 1820s onwards, the coffee house also served as an exchange for domestic and foreign merchants. The Café Littéraire on Weinplatz, also known as Café zum roten Turm, was first mentioned in contemporary reports in 1804 and was known as a meeting place for the liberal to liberal-radical movement. On the night before 6 September 1839, when the enraged rural population marched into the city during the Züriputsch and forced the liberal government to resign by violence, the government’s supporters gathered there, already sensing the approaching disaster.

The Café Littéraire and its landlord Johann Gross gained great fame far beyond Switzerland’s borders in 1845, when Gross carried out a cloak-and-dagger operation to free the liberal Dr Robert Steiger, who had been imprisoned in conservative Lucerne, and brought him back to Zurich. The Zurich newspaper “Schweizerische Republikaner” celebrated the landlord Gross enthusiastically in its issue of 1 July as a man who not only provided food and drink, but also freedom.

Zurich merchant Julius Uster had a lucky escape. The founder of the Grand Café Odeon had to file for bankruptcy during construction. But because he won the Spanish lottery, he was still able to open the coffee house on 1 July 1911. Hugo Laubi designed the poster in 1920 on behalf of the Grand Café Odeon. Today, it hangs in the Café Bar at Bellevue. Photo: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Poster Collection, ZHdK — Image: Zurich merchant Julius Uster had a lucky escape. The founder of the Grand Café Odeon had to file for bankruptcy during construction. But because he won the Spanish lottery, he was still able to open the coffee house on 1 July 1911. Hugo Laubi designed the poster in 1920 on behalf of the Grand Café Odeon. Today, it hangs in the Café Bar at Bellevue. (Source: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Poster Collection, ZHdK.)

Over time, Zurich’s coffee houses lost their political significance. But their role as meeting places for intellectuals continued into the 20th century. The Grand Café Odeon in particular, which welcomed many prominent visitors after opening around 1911, became a symbol of this tradition. Guests of the Art Nouveau coffee house included figures as diverse as Lenin and Mussolini, the Swiss writers Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and international intellectuals such as Klaus Mann, James Joyce and William Somerset Maugham.

The 20th century

Coffee was still considered a luxury good well into the 20th century and was often roasted at home by maids and housewives. They usually bought green coffee in colonial goods shops. Many cookbooks from the 19th century contain detailed instructions on how to recognise good green coffee and prepare it in a roasting pan.

With the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society, people spent less and less time at home. As a result, coffee roasting also shifted from the household to the retail trade. The traditional speciality shop Schwarzenbach in Zurich’s Oberdorf, which has been selling coffee and other colonial goods since 1864, only began roasting coffee for its customers in 1928.

Coffee prices also fell with the rise of consumer cooperatives in Switzerland. These emerged in various cantons from the 1840s onwards in response to high food prices and joined forces in 1890 to form the Verband Schweizerischer Konsumvereine (VSK), which later became the Coop cooperative.

Image: In Migros’ first price list from 1 January 1925, one kilogram of coffee cost between CHF 3.85 and 4.90, depending on the blend. (Source: Federation of Migros Cooperatives.)

Roasted coffee was also part of the first range offered by Migros’ mobile shops. Its founder Gottfried Duttweiler recognised the large price differences between wholesale and retail in the 1920s. By consistently applying modern production and distribution principles, he succeeded in reducing the cost of coffee in the long term. Today, Coop and Migros are by far the highest-turnover retail and wholesale companies in Switzerland.

Who invented it?

In 1929, record harvests in Brazil coincided with the global economic crisis triggered by Black Friday. Because coffee prices subsequently collapsed, large quantities of green coffee were dumped into the Atlantic or burned. The “Banque Française et Italienne pour l’Amérique du Sud”, based in Brazil, was left sitting on enormous quantities of green coffee and began looking for ways to save it. With the idea of making coffee more durable by turning it into soluble coffee cubes, senior employees approached Louis Dapples, a former director of the bank who had since become head of a Swiss company that already had experience in powdering milk-based drinks. The company’s name: Nestlé.

Max Morgenthaler, the inventor of Nescafé, had the best-equipped laboratory at Nestlé, which only he and one female employee were allowed to enter. Photo: Nestlé Historical Archives, Vevey — Image: Max Morgenthaler, the inventor of Nescafé, had the best-equipped laboratory at Nestlé, which only he and one female employee were allowed to enter. (Source: Nestlé Historical Archives, Vevey.)

Dapples commissioned the chemist Max Morgenthaler to search for methods that would preserve coffee flavour better than the instant coffee available in the United States at the time. Morgenthaler was initially unsuccessful, which led Nestlé to suspend the project after four years. But the chemist did not give up and continued his research on his own at his home above Vevey until he finally achieved a breakthrough in 1936. With the help of added carbohydrates, he was able to bind the aromas for longer. As a result, soluble coffee could be stored for significantly longer.

Left image: In the first decades after its founding, Migros often emphasised the exotic character of coffee in its advertising. This was also the case in this poster by Karl Schlegel, created between 1935 and 1940. Right image: A colourful poster by Donald Brun from 1943, cleverly incorporating the sender Coop and the claim into the headline of the enclosed newspaper. Source: Poster Collection, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, ZHdK — Left image: In the first decades after its founding, Migros often emphasised the exotic character of coffee in its advertising. This was also the case in this poster by Karl Schlegel, created between 1935 and 1940.
Right image: A colourful poster by Donald Brun from 1943, cleverly incorporating the sender Coop and the claim into the headline of the enclosed newspaper. (Source for both images: Poster Collection, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, ZHdK.)

Nestlé finally launched the new product on 1 April 1938 under the name Nescafé. It went on to become one of the most successful food brands of the 20th century. By 1940, Nescafé was already available in more than thirty countries. Its definitive breakthrough came in the post-war period, when Nescafé became part of the US Army’s food rations and thereby gained recognition in numerous countries where troops were stationed, as well as later in Great Britain and the United States. To this day, Nescafé generates high revenues for the food group. Allegedly, around 5,500 cups of Nescafé are consumed worldwide every second. Various experts, such as Chahan Yeretzian, Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, even believe that soluble coffee could in future reach the flavour quality of high-grade specialty coffees.

Arthur Schmed, inventor of fully automatic coffee machines for home use, with prototypes. — Image: Arthur Schmed in the early 2000s with a functional model and the prototype of his fully automatic coffee machine. (Source: Peter Schweizer, “Systematisch Lösungen finden”, 3rd revised edition, 2008, vdf Hochschulverlag at ETH Zurich.)

The next major invention that sustainably strengthened Switzerland as a coffee location came from a mechanical engineer at a hazardous waste incineration plant. Arthur Schmed, as he was called, had earned a reputation in the late 1970s for being able to repair almost any machine. When the Italian Sergio Zappella, owner of an electrical goods shop in Wetzikon, had problems with espresso machines made in Italy, Schmed was called in.

He quickly found the technical solution. But the subject would not let him go. His idea was to develop a machine with which even non-experts could reliably make good espresso. The entire process, from grinding to the finished cup, was to run automatically, be easy to maintain and still fit into a home kitchen. The engineer achieved this by developing a removable and waterproof brewing group. Together with Sergio Zappella, he founded the company Saeco. Under the label of the household appliance manufacturer Solis, the two presented the first fully automatic coffee machine for home use at the Basel Mustermesse. The machine became a bestseller in the following years.

The coffee from these new machines was less strong and viscous than espresso from traditional portafilter machines. At the same time, it was clearly different from filter coffee. The characteristic crema on the surface gave this drink its name: the Swiss café crème was born. The success of these fully automatic machines created a new market. Soon, other Swiss manufacturers entered into competition with one another, laying the foundation for the global reputation of coffee machines “Made in Switzerland”. Today, Swiss manufacturers equip major international restaurant and fast-food chains with fully automatic coffee machines. Thermoplan from Weggis supplies Starbucks’ global branch network. Franke from Aarburg equips McDonald’s kitchens. Schaerer from Zuchwil supplies machines for Dunkin’.

Just one year after the first fully automatic coffee machine, Nestlé launched the Nespresso system, which is said to have been developed by engineer Eric Favre in the research and development department. With this system, coffee is supplied in individual aluminium capsules. Nestlé patented the capsule shape and successfully prevented other manufacturers from entering the high-margin market for many years. Commercial success was slow at first and only truly took off in the 2000s. The advertising campaign with US actor George Clooney, who made the famous slogan “What else?” known around the world, also contributed to the breakthrough. The more than ten billion Nespresso capsules sold each year are still produced in Avenches, Orbe and Romont.

The success of Nespresso made Switzerland the world export champion for roasted coffee by revenue in the 2010s. Although Germany and Italy exported significantly larger quantities, Switzerland generated almost two billion euros in revenue, more than 40 percent higher than its two neighbouring countries. Today, Switzerland is strong not only in the export of roasted coffee, but also plays a central role in the international trade of green coffee. Estimates suggest that between 50 and 75 percent of the world’s traded green coffee is handled through locations between Winterthur and Geneva. Key players include subsidiaries of international corporations such as the Neumann Kaffee Gruppe from Hamburg, Jacobs Douwe Egberts from Amsterdam and Starbucks from Seattle. In addition to tax advantages, Switzerland benefits from stable legal conditions, a reliable financial system and international treaties that enable secure money transfers and conversion into stable currencies.