Sage, Breville and the confusion about their names: Are they the same brand?

If you have been browsing espresso machines on Amazon, you have surely seen machines from two brands, Sage and Breville. If you have continued searching for information about them, you may have also noticed that the Sage coffee machines you can buy in Europe are sold in other countries under the name Breville; the most popular of them being the the Barista Express.

At the same time, there are Breville coffee machines you can buy in Europe, but they are not the same as those sold in other countries under that same brand. What is going on with these brands? Are they different or are they the same? I clarify this whole matter in one of the (surprisingly) few articles you will find on the subject.

Yes, Sage and Breville are the same brand, but…

Breville was born in Australia in 1932, founded by Bill O’Brien and Harry Norville; the name Breville is the combination of their last names. The brand manufactured all kinds of kitchen appliances for decades, and in 2001 it was sold to Housewares International Limited, which in 2008 changed the group’s name to Breville Group Limited.

Until then, Breville had been selling its products in Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, and Hong Kong, but when expanding to other markets, it encountered a problem: in the United Kingdom, there was already a manufacturer called Breville, also of kitchen appliances.

So to sell in the United Kingdom, it had to invent the name of another brand: that brand would be Sage, and Breville also used it for the rest of Europe, since with the United Kingdom being in the EU, it could also have a conflict selling under the name Breville.

So far so good, quite easy to understand. But the big mess comes because that other brand that already existed in the United Kingdom, with the same name Breville, also sells coffee machines, and quite similar to those of the other Breville/Sage.

Let’s talk about this other brand, because the matter is also quite interesting.

The “other Breville” and its sisters Oster and Sunbeam

As I was saying, the Australian Breville was forced to sell its products in Europe under the name Sage because in the United Kingdom there was already a brand called Breville. In turn, this British Breville had been acquired by the Jarden group, which also owns the Oster and Sunbeam brands, also of kitchen appliances.

What happens? Jarden sells some of Breville’s products under these other brands because it encounters the same problem as its Australian counterpart: in Australia, Canada, and the USA, there is already another Breville. Thus, in North America, it sells its products under the Sunbeam brand, in South America under the Oster brand, and in Europe, it uses the Breville brand, although in Amazon stores across Europe, they can also be purchased under the name Oster, which makes things even more confusing.

This British Breville is the brand responsible for one of the best-selling espresso machines with an integrated grinder on Amazon: the Breville Barista Max. But this coffee machine has nothing to do with the Australian Breville, called Sage in Europe: if you look, neither on the Sage website (Europe) nor on the Breville website (USA) will you see this coffee machine, simply because it is from another manufacturer!

In turn, there are a few models that the Australian Breville does not sell in the European market. For example, the coffee machine that illustrates this article, the Breville Infuser, is not in the Sage catalog.

Who is who: Which coffee machines belong to each brand?

Let’s see, then, which manufacturer the coffee machines from these brands that you can buy on Amazon belong to:

The ultimate trick to differentiate the two Brevilles: the logo
The next time you see a Breville brand coffee machine and don’t know which of the two brands it belongs to (the British or the Australian), you can look at the logo. Certainly, neither of the two brands has made it easy, because to make matters worse, both logos look similar, but just take a closer look and you will see that the logos are different: the one on the left is the logo of the “Australian” Breville and the one on the right is the logo of the “British” Breville. 

Which brand is better, the Australian Breville or the British Breville?

Well, we have already seen that there are actually two different Brevilles, and that one of them sells its products under the name Sage in Europe. Now, is one better than the other?

Rather than talking in terms of better or worse, we have to talk about two very different types of users they are aimed at. And that is because Breville/Sage bets on a barista-type coffee machine for an expert/advanced user, while the British Breville has coffee machines more for a beginner-intermediate user.