A Costa Coffee Taster’s Tongue Was Insured at Lloyd’s for £10,000,000 in 2009. That Is £1,000 a Taste Bud.

One tongue. Ten million pounds.

On 9 March 2009, Lloyd’s of London reported that the tongue of Gennaro Pelliccia was insured for £10,000,000. Pelliccia was not a singer or an athlete. He was the master of coffee at Costa Coffee, and his job was to taste beans.

The policy was real, the placement was at Lloyd’s, and the announcement was reported the same day by Insurance Journal and logged by Guinness World Records as the highest insured tongue on its books.

What the tongue actually did for a living

Pelliccia personally tasted every batch of raw coffee beans arriving at Costa’s roastery in London, before those beans were roasted and shipped to stores.

That is the underwriting logic in one sentence. A single palate stood between the supply chain and every cup the chain sold.

If that palate stopped working, the company would not lose a celebrity. It would lose its quality-control instrument.

Then there is the piece of arithmetic that has followed the story ever since, and that Insurance Journal printed on the day. The average human tongue carries roughly 10,000 taste buds, so £10,000,000 spread across 10,000 taste buds is £1,000 apiece.

One more small thing explains how a single number turns into several.

Guinness World Records logged the policy at £10 million and about $14 million. Insurance Journal, reporting the same day, headlined it at $13.78 million.

Neither is wrong. The pound figure is fixed and the dollar figure is a conversion, so it moves with whatever exchange rate the day supplied.

The rule that follows from this is simple. The policy is a £10,000,000 policy. Every dollar version of it is a translation with a date attached.

What “placed at Lloyd’s” actually means

The phrase gets used loosely in every retelling of a story like this.

Lloyd’s of London is not an insurance company. It is a marketplace, a building full of separate syndicates that each take a share of a risk. Saying a policy was “placed at Lloyd’s” describes where the deal was struck, not which firm carries it.

That distinction is exactly what goes missing when these stories get repeated. In this case Management Today named the broker that arranged the policy, Glencairn, and no syndicate.

The tradition it was written into

Body-part cover is a long-running piece of Lloyd’s folklore, and some of it holds up.

In the early 1920s the silent-film comedian Ben Turpin took out a policy, reported as arranged at Lloyd’s, that would pay him $25,000 if his crossed eyes ever spontaneously straightened. His strabismus, a condition in which the eyes do not align, was his entire screen identity. Losing it meant losing the act.

Even that figure would not sit still. A 1920 fan booklet already had the sum at $100,000.

The Turpin policy follows the same logic as Pelliccia’s tongue, with one twist. The insured thing is not a body part but an income stream that happens to live inside one, and Turpin’s policy does not pay out for injury. It pays out for recovery. The insured event is his eyes becoming normal, which would have cost him his career.

That is the tradition Costa’s announcement stepped into: the better part of a century of underwriters pricing the specific, weird, non-replaceable thing that makes one person’s living possible.

Betty Grable’s legs, and what the record says

The standard example of Lloyd’s insuring a body part is Betty Grable’s legs. The 1940s pin-up star, the million-dollar limbs, Lloyd’s of London on the certificate. It is the founding image of the whole genre.

The accounts do not agree with each other.

In one account, Mental Floss’s, the policy on Grable’s legs was taken out by her studio, 20th Century Fox, which had the obvious commercial interest in protecting them, at $100,000 and later raised to $250,000, with Lloyd’s providing the cover. In another, a 2014 reference work on American women in the performing arts cited by Wikipedia, the studio insured the legs for $1 million as a publicity stunt.

Same legs, same studio, and a sum that runs from $100,000 to $1,000,000 depending on which book is open. Neither page cites a policy document.

So the tradition Costa’s 2009 announcement joined is real, but its most famous exhibit comes with a number that moves by a factor of ten between retellings.

Pelliccia’s tongue is, by contrast, the better-documented case. It has a date, a named market, a stated sum, and a named human being who agreed to it.

What the announcement does not say

An insurance announcement is a marketing artifact before it is a policy document.

The 2009 coverage establishes the sum, the placement at Lloyd’s, and the insured. It does not publish the wording.

That means the interesting questions stay unanswered in public. What counts as a loss of the tongue, total physical loss only or a measurable loss of taste function, and who certifies that a palate has failed, and against what baseline?

Whether the policy renewed after 2009, and whether it is in force now, is also not established by the announcement.

None of that undercuts the story. It just marks where the documents stop. A sum insured is a fact. The trigger that would pay it is not in the public file.

Why anyone underwrites a tongue at all

The reason these policies exist is duller than the headlines, and better.

Insurance prices the loss of a stream of value, whether that stream runs through a cargo hold, a factory line or a taster’s palate. The underwriter does not care that the asset is attached to a person. It cares that the asset is unique, hard to replace, and generating money.

A tongue that clears every bean for a national coffee chain is a single point of failure. Companies buy cover on single points of failure. That is the entire trade.

The £1,000-per-taste-bud line is what makes it funny. The single-point-of-failure logic is what makes it ordinary.

Where the file sits

This entry lives in the Weird Claims Locker with a documented sum, a named placement, and one clearly marked gap: the policy wording has never been public.

Guinness World Records still carries the entry under the heading “highest insured tongue,” the highest on its own books, dated 9 March 2009 at £10 million.

Pelliccia’s own line, as Management Today quoted it that day: “My 18 years of experience enable me to distinguish between thousands of flavours.” The entry and the Insurance Journal report are linked in the Sources block below.