Mr. Espresso: Emilio Lavazza

Emilio Lavazza

Emilio Lavazza, who has died aged 78, helped to spread Italian coffee culture around the world as head of a family-run business which now sells coffee in 90 countries, including Britain, the United States and even Brazil (the country where, as the song recalls, they have an awful lot of it already).

(Published: 6:51PM BST The Daily Telegraph May 2010) An old-style entrepreneur, he began working in 1955 in the business founded by his grandfather Luigi in 1895 in Turin. It was Luigi's idea to blend coffees from different sources, skilfully balancing delicate aromas and flavours.

Known as "Mr Espresso", "The King of Coffee" or (to his employees) simply "Signor Emilio", Lavazza drove – with Ernesto Illy, who for many years ran the Trieste-based Illycaffè company – a postwar boom that spread the technique of making espresso coffee to an international audience.

 As a young man Emilio started out delivering ground Lavazza coffee door-to-door to restaurants around Turin. By the early 1960s the firm was the first in Italy to have introduced vacuum-packed grounds. To promote the product, Lavazza initiated award-winning campaigns featuring celebrities such as the singer Luciano Pavarotti and the film star Nino Manfredi proclaiming the company's slogan: "Lavazza Coffee: the more of it you down, the more it picks you up".

To this day, the company prides itself on its stylish publicity, and produces an annual calendar with occasionally risqué images shot by world-class photographers like Helmut Newton, Annie Leibovitz and Finlay MacKay.

Vacuum packs were not the only innovation. At a coffee laboratory in Turin, Lavazza developed coffee capsules for single-shot brewing and other technical advances in roasting and vending. In the 1980s the company began opening "real" Italian coffee bars across Europe, with subsidiaries in Britain, France, Germany and Austria as well as the United States. Lavazza's personal mission was to beat back American-based chains such as Starbucks, and his company most recently ventured into the Indian market with the Barista coffee chain.

Emilio Lavazza was born in Turin in 1932 and lived there all his life. An intensely private man, he instinctively avoided the public eye. The company is still privately owned, and a fourth generation of Lavazzas are among the company's senior management.

He became chief executive officer (after his father's death) in 1971 and chairman (on the death of his uncle) in 1979. At the helm he maintained the family strategy of seeking beans ever further afield – according to the company, it is today the sixth-largest purchaser of green coffee beans in the world.

He also consolidated the company's grip on the domestic Italian market with products such as Lavazza Gold and Grand'Espresso which, with its cheaper varieties, accounted for almost half the coffee sold in a country where the drink is a national obsession.

An enthusiastic sports fan, Lavazza once reportedly turned down the presidency of his local football team. His company was a sponsor of the 1998 World Cup in France.

In a rare interview with an Italian newspaper in 2003 Lavazza spoke of his passion for fishing, jazz, and collecting toy soldiers – of which he amassed so many that storing them became a bone of contention with his wife. He was also a connoisseur of murder mysteries, and wrote two himself.

Lavazza served several terms as president of the Italian Association of Food Manufacturing. In 1991 he was honoured as a Knight of Labour for his services to Italian industry, and in 1993 received an honorary degree from Turin University.

Emilio Lavazza, who died on February 16, is survived by his wife and their son and daughter, both directors of the company.