Ninja’s Luxe Cafe debuted in the US recently and now it’s getting a wider release at IFA 2024.
Indeed, Ninja says that it is already the number one espresso maker in the US after just a few weeks thanks to a $499 starting price (though it has sold lower end coffee machines there for around a decade).
We’ve had a good look at the smart new machine that not only does espresso (and associated mik drinks), it’ll make cold brew (which extracts slowly) and drip coffee with minimal effort. There’s no UK price as yet in theory, though it surely will hit a sub-£500 price point given how much it is in the US.
There’s no getting away from the fact the machine looks quite complex to use even if it isn’t; the company set out to minimise the guesswork that you get with a lot of auto coffee machines where you don’t necessarily know what settings to adjust. The buzzphrase Ninja has come up with for this is ‘Barista Assist’. Essentially, it’ll recommend settings for the best results, whether this is the grind size, dose or adjusting temperature or pressure – each brew is monitored to ensure that you get the best coffee you can.
Milk is also handled primarily by four preset programs that enable you to get steamed milk, thin froth, thick froth and cold foam.
The manual machine is available in three different versions – Essential for espresso and filter coffee, Premier for cold brew and milk drinks and Pro, which enables you to customise everything.
Reading between the lines, we’d expect the company to do a full bean-to-cup maker at some point soon, but Shark’s European president Tom Brown told us the company is focused on “where we can disrupt”, something his colleague Neil Shah was keen to elaborate on
“If you look at our history in the last 17 years, every category that we’re number one in is where we’ve been able to create disruptive innovation at affordable price points. And you know, we are super focused on manufacturing for design and manufacturing for quality.
“We could easily make this $100 more expensive, but then the consumer is paying for our inefficiencies. So we are super focused on making sure that we are making the products as efficient as possible. And it starts from the development phase, where our engineering team is looking at every component, every interaction to make sure we’re creating a product design that’s going to be the most efficient to manufacture.”
Ninja also announced that the much-vaunted Ninja Slushi frozen drink maker is also now available outside of the US, too.
