The Swiss food multi-national Nestle is investing $1.25m (£1m) in Zimbabwe to help revive its coffee industry, news agency Bloomberg reports.

It is set to buy nearly all the coffee produced by the country’s smallholder farmers and plans to produce limited editions of its Nespresso coffee pods to appeal to a market looking for new tastes.

“We are rebuilding an industry that was disappearing,” Chief Executive Officer Jean-Marc Duvoisin told Bloomberg.

“They produced a lot of coffee before, so there’s a lot of history. Some people know Zimbabwean coffee but most have never tried it.”

“Nespresso expects to buy more than 95 percent of the high quality coffee production of Zimbabwean smallholders this season. The coffee will be available to global consumers in 2019,” it said in a statement.

“Zimbabwe’s coffee sector is in danger of disappearing as the result of a sharp decline in production over the past 18 years, following a series of economic shocks affecting many of Zimbabwe’s agricultural industries,” the company said.

The economy suffered during the decades-long presidency of Robert Mugabe. His successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, has pledged to re-engage the country with the world.