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Brand review · 3 min readCarte Noire coffee review
What Carte Noire sells, what it costs against the rest of the market, and who should buy it.
Carte Noire sells 3 coffees in the UK and the cheapest comes out at 21p a cup, which is less than most of the pods coffee we track. Cheap coffee is easy to find and hard to trust, so the useful question is not whether it is cheap. It is what the range actually contains, and whether the bag doing the heavy lifting is the one you would want.
Short answer
Push-button coffee and it is cheap.
Cheaper than 95% of the pods coffee we track
- Tastes
- Balanced, caramel and chocolate
- Strength
- Medium
- Best for
- Quick weekday cups
- Valuecup price vs the format median
- 5/5
- Easy to likefrom the roast profile
- 5/5
- Good for beginnersblend, roast and pack size
- 5/5
Cheapest cup£0.20across 3 products
Against the market−60%vs the pods median
Two cups a day£2.87a week, £4.38 less than typical
Mostly roastedMediumcaramel, balanced
Buy it ifyour machine takes these capsules
Skip it ifyou are chasing a named farm or origin
Carte Noire products we track
Cheapest per cup first, with live prices.
Prices are the last we fetched and can move. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. It never changes the order, which is always cheapest per cup first.
What kind of roaster this is
Carte Noire sells pods in the UK, and we track 3 of their coffees, in 60 pods.
Expect blends here rather than named farms: 100% of the classified range is blended. The trade is a familiar one. You give up the story on the label and you get a cup that does not drift between orders. The roasting sits on just 2 of our five levels, so this is a range with a house style rather than a spread to pick from. Capsules here are compatible capsules, so check that against your machine before anything else on this page matters.
Formats and origins
What Carte Noire sources and sells. Each one is a live filter across every brand we track.
What Carte Noire coffee costs
The range runs from 21p to 25p a cup across three products. That is a 1.2× spread inside a single brand, which is why "is Carte Noire expensive" is the wrong question; the right one is which bag you pick. The cheapest is Espresso Classique in the 60 pods, and the dearest is Espresso Lungo in the 60 pods.
| Product | Format | Size | Per cup | Per kg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Espresso Classique | pods | 60 pods | £0.20 | — |
| Espresso Intense | pods | 60 pods | £0.24 | — |
| Espresso Lungo | pods | 60 pods | £0.25 | — |
Bags themselves run £12.30 to £15.23. Ignore that column. A bigger bag costs more and almost always costs less per cup, which is the only number that follows you home.
The one to buy
If you buy one thing from Carte Noire, buy Espresso Classique. At 21p a cup it comes in around 60% under the median for pods coffee, and that is measured against every brand in our catalogue rather than against Carte Noire's own list prices. Nothing else in the range gets close on that test.
What that costs over a year
How much coffee do you drink?
- Carte Noire£0.20 per cup£150
- Typical pods£0.52 per cup, our median£378
At 2 cups a day, Carte Noire costs £228 less a year than the typical pods coffee we track. That is the same coffee habit, bought better.
How Carte Noire tastes
We have not tasted Carte Noire, so we are not going to invent a tasting note. A flavour score we did not earn would be worth less than none, and this section would be the easiest place on the site to quietly make one up. What we can show you is measured: where every coffee in the range sits on our own five-point roast scale, and which origins go into it. Roast is the strongest single predictor of whether a cup arrives bright and fruity or dark and chocolatey, so it is the closest honest answer to what this brand is like to drink.
How Carte Noire roasts
Every coffee standardised onto our own five-point scale rather than the roaster's. Read these as tendencies: origin, process and how you brew all move the cup.
Who it suits
- People who found something they like and want it to taste the same next year, which is what a blend is for.
- Pod machine owners, though price a compatible capsule for your machine before committing to the brand's own.
- People who already know they like a medium roast, because that is essentially all there is here.
Is it good value?
Our test is simple, and it is the same one we apply to everything: cost per cup against the median for the same format. Carte Noire clears it comfortably on at least one product, which more brands fail than pass. Worth knowing that the saving is concentrated in the larger bags rather than spread evenly, so buying the small size gives most of it back.
What else to consider
No brand is worth buying without knowing what sits next to it on price. These are the closest pods coffees we track to Carte Noire, and the comparison hubs will put all of them on the same per-cup basis if you want to go wider.
Coffees priced like Carte Noire
The closest pods coffees on price per cup, from brands we also track. If one of these is cheaper for the same thing, that is worth knowing before you order.
Compare against the market
Keep reading
PricesCarte Noire price guideEvery bag priced per cup and per kilo, with the cheapest route to each one.BrandAll Carte Noire pricesLive prices on all 3 products, cheapest cup first.CompareEvery pods coffeeAll 129 of them on one per-cup basis, filterable by roast and origin.ReviewL'OR reviewThe closest brand to Carte Noire on price, at 21p a cup.OffersToday's best valueEverything currently priced well under the median for its own format.