Let’s talk K-Cups®: scourge of the earth, or the coffee of the future?

Beginning today, you can purchase Perkolator coffee in single-serve cups compatible with the Keurig® brewing system! For those of you that are excited about this, we are excited for you to try them and to hear how they stack up against what you are currently brewing! We’ve worked for a long time to create a product that will surpass the current selection available, in both flavor and freshness, while remaining at a competitive price point. For those of you who are concerned that we would ever package our product in such a way, let’s talk. We think that there’s room for everyone to enjoy our coffee however they brew!

     Let’s address the elephant in the room, which is the environmental impact of these pods. Even the inventor of the K-Cup® acknowledged that they were problematic in a widely read article several years ago in The Atlantic. For the last decade, we have worked so hard to reduce our footprint in every single aspect of our business. This year, we started roasting coffee with a zero-emissions electric roaster! We had glass and compostable straws before it was cool. We moved from plastic to-go containers to compostable clamshells years ago. We used paper bags before the plastic bag ban. We encouraged the use of travel mugs, and even offered a discount to those who brought them! But the pandemic has changed the calculus on disposables in a major way. While we still pride ourselves on earth-conscious packaging, let’s be honest: we use way more of it than we ever bargained for. And as life returns to normal, some of these habits will take a long time to fade.

Secondly, there has always been concern about the quality of the product in a single serving pod, and with good reason! The average life cycle of a pod can be a year. That’s a long time to have a freshness-dependent item sitting on the shelf. When large manufacturers produce single serve pods, they are shipped to various distribution centers around the country, where they can sit for months prior to being purchased at the store level. Our single-serve pods are filled with coffee roasted the day of packaging, and then arrive back to us from the manufacturing facility packaged and ready to go within 48 hours. We order only what we need for a short time period, which guarantees that your Perkolator single-serve pods are never stale. Additionally, the pods are immediately nitrogen flushed, which helps to maintain freshness for months to come!

We will always encourage our customers to brew freshly roasted and ground coffees, but when that is not an option, we hope to add some excitement to the otherwise giant, burnt, stale, flavored varieties currently available to single serve customers. At the time of this blog post, the largest international coffee chain has 29 varieties of K-Cups® available for their customers to purchase. And while there are no fewer than 10 different systems available to brew single serve coffees, we find that Keurig® is still king when it comes to market share. By releasing two different blends, a light roast, Morning Glory, and a dark roast, Painted Black, we will continue our quest of adding value to our community by taking something that is already being purchased by so many, and bringing that manufacturing closer to home (while also greatly increasing the quality and freshness!) We believe that single-use coffee has not only been given a second chance because of this pandemic, but that in certain applications (schools, offices, retail break rooms, airbnbs/hotels, service stations, etc.) it will actually be the safer choice.