1. The short answer

Yes — Breville Group Limited (ASX: BRG), the Sydney-headquartered appliance company, acquired 100% of the Italian prosumer espresso brand Lelit. The deal was announced and became effective on 11 March 2022, with the transaction completing by mid-2022. Breville paid approximately €113 million (about US$124 million) in a combination of cash and Breville shares. Lelit continues to design and manufacture its machines in Italy and operates as a distinct brand within the Breville Group rather than being folded into Breville's own product line.

That last point is the one most buyers actually care about. Ownership changes happen behind the scenes constantly in the appliance world, but what matters to someone shopping for a home espresso machine is whether the product itself has changed. In Lelit's case, the honest answer is: not in any way that affects how the machines are engineered, where they are built, or who is behind their design.

2. Who Owns Lelit?

For most of its history, Lelit was a fully independent, family-run Italian company. Founded by the Epis family in the 1980s near Brescia, it started out producing steam irons before moving into home espresso machines in the early 2000s, eventually becoming one of the best-known Italian prosumer espresso brands. Breville and Lelit were entirely separate businesses for decades, with Breville focused on mainstream kitchen appliances out of Australia and Lelit focused on serious home-espresso engineering out of Italy.

That changed on 11 March 2022, when Breville Group announced it had agreed to buy 100% of the Lelit group from its founders on a cash-and-debt-free basis. Half of the purchase price was paid in cash and half through newly issued Breville shares. As part of the agreement, Lelit's founders and key members of its Italian management team joined the Breville Group rather than exiting the business, which is part of why day-to-day design and engineering decisions have stayed close to home.

The acquisition was a deliberate step in a broader Breville strategy to build a one-stop specialty-coffee portfolio. It followed Breville's 2020 purchase of the US-based grinder maker Baratza, bringing espresso machines and grinders together under one corporate parent aimed squarely at the specialty-coffee market rather than only entry-level home appliances. At the time of the announcement, Breville's leadership described the deal as bringing together "two great coffee cultures" — Australian appliance design and Italian espresso engineering — rather than folding one brand into the other.

Lelit had grown quickly in the years leading up to the deal, expanding its workforce and production capacity to keep up with rising demand from home baristas around the world. That growth trajectory made it an attractive fit for a larger company like Breville looking to strengthen its position in the specialty-coffee segment, where buyers tend to care more about extraction control and build quality than about convenience features alone. Rather than acquiring a struggling brand that needed rescuing, Breville bought a company already on a strong upward trend — which is part of why the deal preserved Lelit's founders and management team instead of replacing them.

3. Is Lelit Still Made in Italy?

Yes. Despite the change in ownership, Lelit continues to design and manufacture its machines in Italy, at its facility in the Brescia area where the company has always been based. The engineering approach that built Lelit's reputation — E61-derived group heads, brass and stainless-steel boilers, and hands-on prosumer controls — has stayed in place across the range since the acquisition.

Lelit's own public position is that its machines are designed and produced in Italy, with final assembly completed at its Brescia-area facility. That is consistent with how most established Italian espresso manufacturers operate, and it matches what Breville itself said when announcing the deal: preserving Lelit's Italian identity was framed as a deliberate part of the acquisition, not an afterthought. The current lineup — including the flow-profiling Bianca, the heat-exchanger Mara X, the dual-boiler Elizabeth, and the single-boiler Victoria — has kept its Italian-made character since 2022.

What the Acquisition Means for Buyers

For anyone shopping for a Lelit machine today, the practical effect of the Breville deal has mostly been about reach rather than engineering. Before the acquisition, Lelit sold direct in the EU and relied on independent distributors for the rest of the world, including North America. Since joining the Breville Group, Lelit has had access to a much larger corporate parent's logistics, retail relationships, and after-sales infrastructure, which has helped the brand become more consistently available in markets like the US without changing where or how the machines themselves are built.

Warranty and service support for Lelit machines still runs through Lelit's own network and authorized retail partners rather than through Breville's separate customer-service operation, since Breville has kept Lelit operating as a standalone brand rather than merging it into Breville's own product and support structure. If you already own a Lelit machine, nothing about how it was built or how it should be serviced has changed because of who owns the parent company.

4. Lelit vs Breville: How the Brands Still Differ

Sharing a corporate parent does not make the two brands interchangeable. Lelit and Breville continue to target different users with genuinely different engineering philosophies, and Breville has kept them positioned as separate brands rather than merging their lineups.

That difference in philosophy shows up throughout each brand's respective lineup, not just in flagship models. Lelit's entry-level and mid-range machines, like the heat-exchanger Mara X and single-boiler Victoria, still lean on E61-style manual workflows and PID control rather than pre-programmed drink buttons. Breville's range, by contrast, is built around guided prompts, built-in grinders, and pressure sensors doing more of the thinking for the user, which is exactly what makes it approachable for someone who wants good espresso without first learning the fundamentals of extraction.

In short: choose Lelit if you want Italian-made precision and manual control that grows with your skills as you learn to dial in shots. Choose Breville if you would rather have automation handle more of the variables for quick, consistent results with less hands-on effort. Browse the current Lelit home coffee machines to see where the Bianca, Mara X, Elizabeth, and Victoria sit relative to each other.

5. Quick Comparison

The table below summarizes the key differences worth knowing before you decide between the two brands. It is not a ranking — Lelit and Breville are built for different buyers, and the "better" choice depends entirely on how hands-on you want to be with your daily espresso routine.

6. Frequently Asked Questions