According to the business magazine Toyo Keizai, on July 24, Nestle Japan announced that it was quitting four industry groups it belonged to: the Japan Fair Trade Coffee Conference, the All Japan Coffee Association, the Japan Instant Coffee Association and the Japan Coffee Importers Association. These groups have, according to Toyo, had problems acknowledging Nestle's description of its new manufacturing method for coffee products that it started using last September.

Nestle no longer calls its Gold Blend and Nescafe Excella brands "instant coffees," but rather "regular soluble coffee," and insists that others do the same. Two months ago, these associations revised their industry fair competition rules, saying that they couldn't allow Nestle to use such a description in their advertising, so Nestle decided to not work with them any more.

Nestle says the manufacturing method is different, so it has a right to call its coffee something different. Most coffee called "instant" these days is made by freeze-drying liquid concentrated coffee liquor. Soluble coffee, however, is a "unique" blend of pulverized roasted coffee beans and dried coffee concentrate. To the layman and, obviously, other members of the coffee industry in Japan, that description doesn't qualify as much of a distinction, but Nestle wants to stress that the new method makes for coffee that is closer to the real thing, meaning coffee brewed from ground roasted beans.