US 5,472,719 · Granted 1995-12-05

The Sealed Cartridge That Revolutionized Single-Serve Coffee Brewing

Imagine a sealed pod filled with ground coffee that you drop into a machine. The machine shoots hot water through it under pressure, and the water dissolves the coffee and flows out into your cup. This patent protects that exact setup—the cartridge design, the pressurized injection system, and how everything fits together to make brewing fast and consistent.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a sealed cartridge system for brewing beverages where a pressurized liquid is injected into a sealed pod containing ground coffee or similar substance. What's protected here is the specific design: a cartridge with a perforated top and flexible membrane on the bottom, housed inside a frusto-conical beaker within a coffee machine's brewing chamber. The patent also covers the perforator-injector mechanism that punctures the cartridge and forces liquid through it under pressure, as well as the way the liquid flows out and is collected. Anyone making a single-serve cartridge system using this pressurized injection method into a sealed pod would be infringing on this patent's core claims.

Why it matters

This patent, filed in 1991 and granted in 1995, sits at the heart of the single-serve coffee revolution. By sealing the coffee inside a cartridge and using pressure injection, the design optimizes extraction time and consistency—every cup tastes the same. Coffea S.A., the assignee, was working in the era before Nespresso and Keurig dominated the market, but this patent represents the fundamental engineering that made pod-based brewing viable. The design protects intellectual property around cartridge geometry, membrane flexibility, and the pressurized injection mechanism itself—core innovations that any competitor would have to work around.

Real-world use

Every time you pop a coffee capsule into a Nespresso machine or similar single-serve brewer, press the button, and hear the hiss of pressurized water, you're using machinery built around principles this patent locked down nearly 30 years ago.

Original USPTO abstract

When in use, the sealed cartridge (1) containing a certain amount of a substance intended for the preparation of a bewerage by dissolution or extraction with a liquid, is placed inside a liquid collector member comprised of a frusto-conical beaker (9). The assembly thus formed is placed inside a housing (21) of a "spoon" of a coffee machine. The top of the cartridge (1) is perforated by a perforator and injector member which injects a liquid under pressure inside the cartridge (1). The lower membrane (2) of the cartridge undergoes a deformation under the effect of the pressure thus generated and is pressed against perforator tips (13) at the bottom of the beaker (9). The liquid flows into the housing (21) and can be collected in cups. The invention makes it possible to optimize the contact time of the substance contained inside the cartridge with the liquid supplied for its dissolution or its extraction.

Patent details

Publication number: US 5,472,719
Filing date: 1991-10-30
Grant date: 1995-12-05
Assignee: Coffea S.A.
Inventor(s): FAVRE; ERIC
CPC class: A47J31/0673

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