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Keurig is a beverage brewing system for home and commercial use. The machines are manufactured by the American company Keurig Dr Pepper. The main Keurig products are: K-Cup pods, which are single-serve coffee containers; other beverage pods; and the proprietary machines that use these pods to make beverages.
Keurig beverage varieties include hot and cold coffees, teas, cocoas, dairy-based beverages, lemonades, cider, and fruit-based drinks. Through its own brands and its partnership licensed brands, Keurig has over 400 different varieties and over 60 brands of coffee and other beverages. In addition to K-Cup pods it includes Vue, K-Carafe, and K-Mug pods as well.
The original single-serve brewer and coffee-pod manufacturing company, Keurig, Inc., was founded in Massachusetts in 1992. It launched its first brewers and K-Cup pods in 1998, targeting the office market. As the single-cup brewing system gained popularity, brewers for home use were added in 2004. In 2006, the publicly traded Vermont-based specialty-coffee company Green Mountain Coffee Roasters acquired Keurig, sparking rapid growth for both companies. In 2012 Keurig"s main patent on its K-Cup pods expired, leading to new product launches, including brewer models that only accept pods from Keurig brands.
From 2006 to 2014, Keurig, Inc. was a wholly owned subsidiary of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. When Green Mountain Coffee Roasters changed its name to Keurig Green Mountain in March 2014, Keurig ceased to be a separate business unit and subsidiary, and instead became Keurig Green Mountain"s main brand.private-equity firm JAB Holding Company for nearly $14 billion.Dr Pepper Snapple Group in a deal worth $18.7 billion, creating Keurig Dr Pepper, a publicly traded conglomerate which is the third largest beverage company in North America.
Keurig founders John Sylvan and Peter Dragone had been college roommates at Colby College in Maine in the late 1970s.Massachusetts, and wanted to solve the commonplace problem of office coffee – a full pot of brewed coffee which sits and grows bitter, dense, and stale – by creating a single-serving pod of coffee grounds and a machine that would brew it.Greater Boston, he went through extensive trial and error trying to create a pod and a brewing machine.Chiquita, as a partner.excellence in Dutch".
The prototype brewing machines were also a work in progress and unreliable, and the company needed funds for development.Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, and the specialty coffee company first invested in Keurig at that time.venture capital; and after pitching to numerous potential investors the three partners finally obtained $50,000 from Minneapolis-based investor Food Fund in 1994, and later the Cambridge-based fund MDT Advisers contributed $1,000,000.
In 1997, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters became the first roaster to offer its coffee in the Keurig "K-Cup" pod for the newly market-ready Keurig Single-Cup Brewing System,Starbucks" market.Tully"s Coffee, Timothy"s World Coffee, Diedrich Coffee, and Van Houtte, although Green Mountain was the dominant brand.installed them in offices for little or no money, relying on the K-Cups for profits.
Keurig is credited with creating a new category with their cup-at-a-time pod-style brewing that was both a breakthrough product and a breakthrough business model.
By 2004, Keurig had a prototype ready for home use, but so did large corporate competitors like Salton, Sara Lee, and Procter & Gamble, which introduced their own single-serve brewers and pods. Keurig capitalized on the increased awareness of the concept, and sent representatives into stores to do live demonstrations of its B100 home brewer and give out free samples.
In 2006, the publicly traded Vermont-based specialty-coffee company Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) – which had successively invested in and acquired increasing percentage ownership of Keurig in 1993, 1996, and 2003, by which time it had a 43% ownership – completed its full acquisition of Keurig.
The joining of Keurig and Green Mountain combined a highly technological brewing-machine manufacturer and a nationwide high-end coffee provider into one company, and created an effective "razor/razorblade" model that allowed for explosive growth and high profits.supermarkets across the U.S.billion.
In February 2011, Green Mountain announced an agreement with Dunkin" Donuts to make Dunkin’ Donuts coffee available in single-serve K-Cup pods for use with Keurig Single-Cup Brewers. In addition, participating Dunkin’ Donuts restaurants on occasion offer Keurig Single-Cup Brewers for sale.Starbucks announced a similar deal whereby Starbucks would sell its coffee and tea in Keurig single-serve pods, and would in return sell Keurig machines in their stores as part of the deal.
In November 2013, Keurig opened a retail store inside the Burlington Mall in Burlington, Massachusetts. The store features the full line of Keurig machines and accessories, and nearly 200 varieties of K-Cups for creating individualized 3-, 6-, or 12-pod boxes.
In early March 2014, shareholders of Keurig"s parent company, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, voted to change its name to Keurig Green Mountain to reflect its business of selling Keurig coffee makers.
In the fall of 2014, Keurig Green Mountain introduced the Keurig 2.0 brewer, with technology to prevent old or unlicensed pods being used in the brewer.
In mid 2015, Keurig debuted the K200, a smaller Keurig 2.0 model that can brew single cups or four-cup carafes and comes in a variety of colors.General Electric announced that its new Café French Door refrigerator, due out in late 2015, will have a Keurig coffee machine built into the door.
Also in September 2015, Keurig launched Keurig Kold, a brewer which creates a variety of cold beverages including soft drinks, functional beverages, and sparkling waters.Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Sprite, Fanta) and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group (e.g. Dr Pepper, Canada Dry) and Keurig"s own line of flavored sparkling and non-sparkling waters and teas, sports drinks, and soda-fountain drinks.
In December 2015, it was announced that Keurig Green Mountain would be sold to an investor group led by private-equity firm JAB Holding Company for nearly $14 billion.
In July 2018, Keurig Green Mountain merged with Dr Pepper Snapple Group in a deal worth $18.7 billion, creating a publicly traded conglomerate which is the third largest beverage company in North America.
Keurig launched Drinkworks Home Bar in late 2018, developed by Keurig Dr Pepper and AB InBev. The machine creates cocktails, beers and ciders through 24 different pods. The device launched to the general public in 2019.
The company"s flagship products, Keurig K-Cup brewing systems, are designed to brew a single cup of coffee, tea, hot chocolate, or other hot beverage. The grounds are in a single-serve coffee container, called a "K-Cup" pod, consisting of a plastic cup, aluminum lid, and filter. Each K-Cup pod is filled with coffee grounds, tea leaves, cocoa powder, fruit powder, or other contents, and is nitrogen flushed, sealed for freshness, and impermeable to oxygen, light, and moisture.
Keurig sells many brewing system models, for household and commercial use. Licensed models from Breville, Cuisinart, and Mr. Coffee, were introduced in 2010.
Its brewing systems for home use include single-cup brewers, and brewers that brew both single-cups and carafes. Keurig also sells commercial brewing models for offices and commercial venues.
Through its owned brands and through its partnerships and licensing, as of 2015 Keurig"s K-Cups and other pods offer more than 400 beverage varieties from 60 brands, including the top ten best-selling coffee brands in the U.S.
In 2011, GMCR launched the Grounds to Grow On program, in which office customers purchase recovery bins for used K-Cups, which are shipped to Keurig"s disposal partner, which composts the coffee grounds and sends the pods to be incinerated in a waste-to-energy power plant.
Regarding potential recyclability, GMCR"s vice president of sustainability stated in 2013 that "The system has a lot of pretty demanding technical requirements in terms of being able to withstand certain amount of temperature and to have a certain kind of rigidity, and provide the right kinds of moisture barriers and oxygen barriers and the like. So it isn"t the simplest challenge."The Atlantic, argues that the level of conscientiousness required to disassemble the cups is somewhat of a paradox to expect from people using a push-button brewing process. In its 2014 Sustainability Report, released in February 2015, Keurig Green Mountain re-affirmed that a priority for the company is ensuring that 100% of K-Cup pods are recyclable by 2020.
In early 2014, following the announcement of its Keurig 2.0 machines engineered to lock out unlicensed pods, seven competitors and a number of purchasers filed lawsuits in Canada and in various United States federal courts.anti-competitive actions designed to drive competitors out of Keurig"s market.
To handle the U.S. anti-competitive lawsuits, in June 2014 the United States Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated the litigation into one docket in the Southern District of New York, where Judge Vernon S. Broderick heard the consolidated case.multidistrict litigation include claims that Keurig improperly acquired competitors, entered into exclusionary agreements with suppliers and distributors to prevent competitors from entering the market, engaged in unwarranted patent-infringement litigation, and unfairly introduced a product redesign that locks out non–Keurig branded cups.
The introduction of the Keurig 2.0 brewer also sparked a number of hacks and workarounds by competitors and consumers in 2014.TreeHouse Foods, claimed to be able to produce its own pods that would work in the 2.0 system.
In December 2014, the company recalled about 7 million of its Keurig Mini Plus Brewing Systems manufactured between December 2009 and July 2014 and sold in the U.S. and Canada. The recall was due to burn injuries reported from water overheating and spewing out of some of the machines, particularly if used to brew more than two cups in quick succession.
By the first quarter of 2015, Keurig sales had dropped 23 percent year over year partly due to unease over Keurig 2.0. In response, Keurig announced they would revive the reusable My K-Cup product by the end of the year.
In November 2017, Keurig posted on its Twitter account that it had ended its advertisements with Sean Hannity"s program on Fox News, in reaction to Hannity"s defense of Senate candidate Roy Moore, who had been accused of sexual misconduct against teenage girls. In response, videos of Hannity"s fans destroying their Keurig machines proliferated on the Internet,
In October 2020, Keurig agreed to settle for $31 million an antitrust lawsuit alleging they cornered the single-serve brewer market by making their machines only accept K-Cup coffee pods.
Nick Lazaris was president and CEO of Keurig, Inc. from 1997 to 2006.Bob Stiller was its president and CEO.Coca-Cola Refreshments, became the President and CEO of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (later Keurig Green Mountain) in December 2012.Pinnacle Foods, replaced Brian Kelley as Keurig Green Mountain"s CEO in May 2016 after KGM was acquired by an investor group led by JAB Holding Company,
* Keurig Green Mountain Inc. plans to buy Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc. in a deal that will create a U.S.-based beverage behemoth with about $11 billion in annual sales and a portfolio that includes the soft drinks Dr Pepper, 7UP and Snapple. If the deal happens, the combined company, to be called Keurig Dr Pepper, may focus on a handful of key high-growth categories, including the Bai brand healthier beverages and ready-to-drink coffees, executives said during a call to discuss the transaction.
If one LCD is good, two is better, right? I"m not talking about two layer LCD. No, that"s still not quite right. LCDs have lots of layers. How about Double Stuf LCD? Nailed it.
Double Stuf LCDs have the potential to improve the contrast ratio of a display with minimal additional power draw and without needing additional LEDs, like
The problem, and what has always been LCD"s problem, is this method doesn"t block all the light. There"s no such thing as a "black" LCD pixel. Some light always leaks through, which is why LCDs have always had worse black levels and contrast compared to other technologies, like
Local dimming was and is a way to improve this. By dimming specific LEDs, or more accurately groups of LEDs called "zones," there"s less light that has to be blocked, so the area on screen appears much darker, perhaps even black. For more on how this works, check out
Most TVs have dozens of LEDs, either on the edges of the screen, or behind it. Fewer LEDs is cheaper and more energy efficient, but don"t always look as good. More LEDs usually looks better, but costs more. If you add WAY more LEDs, you"ve got
In Hisense"s prototypes and the current version of this TV (currently only available in China), the second layer was 1080p on a 4K display. Hisense promises that when this tech reaches US shores, both layers will be 4K. This means that essentially it"s an LCD TV with a 8 million zone backlight, far more than even mini-LED has. With two 4K modules, each pixel gets a far greater ability to block the light from the backlight, greatly improving this longstanding LCD issue and improving the contrast ratio.
Price-wise, Hisense is aiming to be cheaper than OLED, though probably similar-to or more than higher-end LCDs. For reference the HZ65U9E, its 65-inch model for sale in China now, is 17,999 yuan, which converts to about $2,500, £2,000, or AU$3,700.
Manufacturers have a lot of money in LCD, and that"s not changing any time soon. They"re always looking out for the next big thing, which is how we got OLED and how we"ll be getting MicroLED. Before we get to the next gen, there"s still a lot of improvement to be made with the current gen. Mini-LED is one aspect of that, and potentially so is dual-LCD. No doubt we"ll hear more about both at CES in January.
As households increasingly demand fresh and higher quality in-home coffee, Keurig Dr Pepper (NASDAQ:KDP) has been beneficiary of the shift away from batch brewed coffee towards single serve machines (figure 8).
In this segment, JDE Peet"s and Keurig Dr Pepper (figure 8) compete against Nestle"s high end Nespresso product. Even though Nestle does not break out its specialty Nespresso sales (discussed in figure 10 below), I believe Nestle"s vast global distribution system and partnership with Starbucks makes it a formidable competitor.
Starbuck"s Channel Development sales reports about one-third the revenues of JDE Peet"s and Keurig"s consumer revenues. Even though the segment is doing well, revenues have declined over the last 3 years due to the following factors: This segment transitioned from a direct sales model under its previous partnership with Kraft to a licensed model under the new Global Coffee Alliance partnership with Nestle Foods, for which Starbucks books only royalty income instead of total sales. As part of the agreement, Starbucks received an upfront cash payment of $7.1 billion in 2018. (although it was subsequently ordered by an arbitrator to pay its previous partner Kraft/Mondelez $2.78 billion for the early exit from their partnership)
Even though JDE Peet"s consumer segment and Keurig Dr Pepper"s coffee systems segment have relatively similar revenues (figure 8), Keurig"s coffee revenues are heavily weighted within the US, whereas JDE"s consumer coffee revenues are mainly outside the US. (About 40% of Keurig Dr Pepper revenues comes from coffee systems; the remaining 60% of revenues derive from niche carbonated soft drinks (e.g., Dr. Pepper, A&W root beer, Canada Dry) and non-carbonated beverages (e.g., Snapple, Hawaiian Punch, Motts).
Keurig"s employs the classic razor-blade model. It sells its coffee makers at relative low price points (often below $100 after website "deals") but ensures them of recurring K-pod sales. It has also grown its B2B (business-to-business) sales to offices, restaurants, healthcare facilities, and the hospitality industry.
Overall revenues of Keurig Dr Pepper and Starbucks have grown 6.5% and 5.8% in the last 2 years (figure 14). In contrast, JDE Peet"s revenues (figure 15) has grown only in the low single percentage.
The EBITDA margins of Starbucks and Keurig have generally held up (figure 16), as has JDE Peet"s (figure 15 above). The EBITDA margin of Starbucks dropped in 2020 when COVID-19 lockdowns around the world caused many of its stores to be shut down but has since recovered.
In the in-home segment, Keurig and Nestle dominate in the US, with Folgers and Kraft as followers. JDE Peet and Nestle are likely the leaders in both Europe and Asia.
Over the last five years, Starbucks and Keurig Dr Pepper stock have kept up with or out-performed the S&P 500 index (figure 18: purple, orange, and blue lines). However, JDE Peet"s has declined and underperformed the S&P500 index since its IPO in mid-2020 (green line).
JDE Peet"s current share price is currently valued at a free cash flow yield of 12.3%. Starbucks and Keurig Dr Pepper have demonstrated consistent higher growth, but at free cash flow yields of 3.3% and 4.3% respectively (figure 19), they are significantly more highly valued than JDE Peet"s.
At current free cash flow multiples (figure 18), Starbucks and Keurig Dr Pepper will need to maintain their growth rates or run the risk of suffering a multiple contraction and sharp price decline. JDE Peet"s lower valuation provides some "margin of safety", but the upside is likely more limited.
Under this scenario, Starbucks will suffer disproportionately due to its higher exposure to out of home coffee store sales. JDE Peet"s coffee store and foodservice as well as Keurig Dr Pepper"s foodservice revenues will also be negatively impacted. Increased at home consumption is likely to only partially offset the loss of out of home sales.
The coffee industry is intensely competitive (discussed above). However, as leaders in their respective segments and geographies, JDE Peet"s, Keurig Dr Pepper, and Starbucks enjoy brand and scale advantages. Furthermore, the oligopolistic industry structure minimizes the risk of profit-destroying price wars.
Keurig Dr Pepper is the leading and fastest growing US in-home coffee provider, while Starbucks is the largest and fastest growing coffee store operator. Both offer attractive growth opportunities for more aggressive investors.
“I don’t have one. They’re kind of expensive to use,” John Sylvan told me frankly, of Keurig K-Cups, the single-serve brewing pods that have fundamentally changed the coffee experience in recent years. “Plus it’s not like drip coffee is tough to make.” Which would seem like a pretty banal sentiment, were Sylvan not the inventor of the K-Cup.
Almost one in three American homes now has a pod-based coffee machine, even though Sylvan never imagined they would be used outside of offices. Last year K-Cups accounted for most of Keurig Green Mountain’s $4.7 billion in revenue—more than five times what the company made five years prior. So even though he gets treated like a minor celebrity when he tells people he founded Keurig, Sylvan has some regrets about selling his share of the company in 1997 for $50,000. But that’s not what really upsets him.
In 2010, journalist and caffeine aficionado Murray Carpenter visited the Keurig facilities in Waterbury, Vermont, reporting for The New York Times that the K-Cup idea posed environmental concerns, as the pods were neither recyclable nor biodegradable. That same year, the Keurig model seemed to take off, doubling in sales. In a 2011 local-boys-make-it-big story in the Boston Globe magazine, Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University, likewise noted that the coffee machines could invite significant backlash because they “generate a ton of plastic waste.”
At the time of Carpenter’s visit, Keurig was on pace to sell 3 million K-Cups. So to say that growth has been good since then is understatement; last year they topped 9 billion. But today the cups are still not recyclable or biodegradable. And they only stand to become rapidly more ubiquitous. Later this year, in partnership with Coca-Cola, the company will release a machine called “Keurig Cold” that will “introduce Coca-Cola’s global brand portfolio” to the machines, growing rapidly closer to the corporate mission: “A Keurig brewer on every counter and a beverage for every occasion.”
Sylvan was certain there was a market for a better, more customizable, more liberating caffeine experience than the tepid office percolator, run by vendors with a corner on the market for delivering terrible coffee en masse. Once he had a design that worked, he looked up the word excellencein Dutch—because “everyone likes the Dutch”—and he and his college roommate Peter Dragone named their new company Keurig.
Sylvan knew the pods would sell. As he explains the appeal now, “It’s like a cigarette for coffee, a single-serve delivery mechanism for an addictive substance.” But he had no idea at the time how ubiquitous the product would become. And, like printer cartridges or razor blades, the Keurig business model was predicated on another type of dependence.
And when the pertinent K-Cup–design patents expired in 2012, and the market was suddenly flooded with off-brand competitors, the company created a second-generation (2.0) machine that would only function with Keurig-brand cups. It’s digital-rights management, the coffee equivalent of Steve Jobs’s attempt to fill iPods with music purchased only through iTunes. That might seem like a reasonable, defensible move to protect intellectual property and keep a corner on the market—except that some of the competitors’ cups are nearly completely biodegradable or reusable. Which does little to deflect the growing criticism that Keurig Green Mountain is not seriously prioritizing sustainability.
Like many users of the Internet, I had actually already seen “Kill the K-Cup.” The mysteriously anonymous YouTube video was published this January, and spread widely. It spawned a hashtag #KillTheKCup (at the suggestion of the final frames of the video), which is still alive on multiple social-media platforms. Imitators have posted videos of themselves throwing their Keurig machines out of windows or bashing them with baseball bats, Office Space style. The “Kill the K-Cup” video was the most popular post on the environmental website Grist for multiple days. I asked the author of the post at the time if she knew the origin of the video; she didn’t. It was relatable enough that it got picked up on news sites even before journalists knew where it came from. It seemed like a strangely high-investment approach to video production, especially for something that no one bothered to take credit for.
Keurig Green Mountain is secretive about how many K-Cups the company actually puts into the world every year. The best estimates say the Keurig pods buried in 2014 would actually circle the Earth not 10.5 times but more than 12. The company would only tell me that last year they sold 9.8 billion Keurig-brewed portion packs—which include the new multiple-cup pods.
“Those are fully recyclable,” Monique Oxender is quick to point out. Oxender came to Keurig Green Mountain in 2012 to serve as its chief sustainability officer. Green Mountain, a company long known for eco-friendly approaches to coffee, acquired Keurig in 2006, even though the company did not change its name to “Keurig Green Mountain” until March of 2014. And indeed, every new K-Cup spinoff product that the company has introduced since 2006 (including the Vue, Bolt, and K-Carafe cups) is recyclable, if a person is willing to disassemble them into paper, plastic, and metal components.
Last year, Keurig Green Mountain pledged to create a fully recyclable version of its blockbuster product, the K-Cup, by 2020. Last month the company’s annual sustainability report reaffirmed that vow. Oxender has reiterated the point multiple times during damage control in the wake of #KillTheKCup. But promising only five more years with this amount of waste has done little to satisfy detractors. Some say it won’t be possible, ever, to make a K-Cup that is anything short of an environmental shit storm.
Even in Halifax, Nova Scotia, one of the few places that can recycle category No. 7 plastic, K-Cups are accumulating in quantities that alarm people who see the waste coming out of offices using the machines. At Egg Studios production company, for example, CEO Mike Hachey remembers the joy that enveloped his office when the Keurig machines first replaced their swill percolator: “Any cup of coffee we want! And look, they brew Starbucks!”
Keeping the video anonymous was only part of Egg Studios’ strategy to create buzz on social media, which led to some news write-ups. After the first week, Egg Studios sent out a press release claiming ownership of the video, and Hachey did some subsequent radio and TV interviews. He even talked with a Singapore newspaper. (There are no Keurig machines in Singapore.) The Edmonton Waste Management Centre called the studio to say they had found that coffee pods account for fully 1 percent of their waste. Hachey has six brand-new coffee presses sitting on his desk, unsolicited gifts from companies that appreciated the video—one signed, “P.S. We hate K-cups, too.”
I asked whether he had heard from Keurig Green Mountain. “They said they liked the video and thought it was funny, and they appreciate the point we’re trying to make,” Hachey said.
At KillTheKCup.org, people can sign a petition that asks Keurig to improve its product. But really, the hashtag is the petition. “We hoped that people would try to take on the cause with us,” he said. Maybe just by giving up K-Cups, or by using the refillable cups that worked with the first version of the machine. And maybe even spreading the hashtag, and bringing more people back to the work of Egg Studios.
When I spoke with Carpenter, he acknowledged that the problem is not actually as straightforward as the Earth-circling cups and the “Most Wasteful Form of Coffee There Is” headlines make it seem. As consumers, we have visceral reactions to the waste that we see being produced, the piles of pods that we watch accumulate in trash bins. But in other ways, unseen, Keurig’s method isn’t the worst.
What’s the big deal about a slightly more efficient extraction process? Oxender emphasizes that coffee beans are a water-intensive crop. Every bit of grounds that is wasted or used below its potential represents a lot of wasted water. And unless you take the time to actually weigh out the exact amount of grounds for a simple, minimalist pour-over, as is in vogue among baristas testing new extremes of consumer annoyance, people are likely to overestimate and overuse. Most homes that brew entire pots of coffee end up throwing out 12–15 percent of the pot, on average, which actually represents 25 liters of wasted water (by Keurig Green Mountain’s calculations), counting backwards all the way to the rain that fell on the beans. People who use single-cup pods are much less likely to brew more coffee than they actually drink.
Keurig has said it was at work on a solution to the waste problem since back in 2010, when Carpenter first visited. If pod backlash continues at its current pace, it does seem that the company will need to quickly innovate, ally, or be displaced. Oxender says the most promising redesign approach involves polypropylene. When considering the potential sustainability of a new material, the company has to think about the entire life cycle, including how many material processing facilities have the technology to accommodate the material and bin it appropriately, and whether there will be a buyer at the back door of the recycling centers. Without that, the recyclers aren’t incentivized to collect it.
Disruptors, it seems, gonna disrupt. As amazing as it would be for Sylvan to capitalize on that and upend the company that once bought him out, he is doing okay either way. When he was bought out of Keurig in 20071997, he turned around and bought stock in Green Mountain for $3.20 per share. He sold the stock a couple years ago when it broke $140. He also recently started a new company that sells solar panels, partly to atone for the environmental problem he believes he created. The company is called Zonbak, which means “sun bucket” in Dutch.
There"s a new Keurig on the block. The Keurig K-Cafe Smart, a new kitchen appliance that promises to make delicious coffeehouse drinks, is out now. And I was able to get my hands on one to test. Here"s what you need to know about the newest coffee maker you can buy.
I hopped onto the coffee bandwagon myself in college, where I fueled my two-a-day habit with a Keurig. I paired the Keurig with a milk frother from Amazon that I still use today. Even following a kitchen fire, I relied on my partially melted Keurig to keep me caffeinated, one K-Cup at a time. (I"ve since replaced that Keurig with a classic Cuisinart coffee maker and regular runs to Starbucks.)
When I heard that Keurig was coming out with the K-Cafe Smart, a new brewer that does more than just brew coffee, I was intrigued. And luckily, as a CBS Essentials shopping expert, I was able to get my hands on one to test out.
The new Keurig K-Cafe Smart ($250) promises to help you create more than 70 coffeehouse drinks at home using coffee pods. This new model looks like a standard Keurig, but has an attached milk frother and way more buttons than the brewer I used during my college days.
The Keurig K-Cafe Smart connects to the Keurig app. You can schedule a brew in advance, brew remotely and more. The coffeemaker"s BrewID tech, meanwhile, selects the ideal settings for whatever K-Cup you choose to use.
Or, you can skip the app. The brewer has five temperature and six strength settings -- the most customization Keurig has ever offered in a coffeemaker. And the milk frother has three temperature settings. The lowest is ideal for making iced drinks, while the highest promises to froth oat and almond milks.
This Keurig can create a highly-concentrated shot of coffee to mimic the profile of espresso. (There are espresso K-Cups available for purchase that you can use for the "shot" function, too.) The "shot" function is ideal for creating lattes, macchiatos and more espresso-driven drinks. There"s an iced coffee button, too, which brews at a lower temperature and flow rate.
Personally, while I enjoyed using and reviewing the Keurig K-Cafe Smart, I"m likely to keep using my existing Cuisinart coffee maker and milk frother. I would, however, recommend it to someone who needs a new coffeemaker. You can do so much more than just brew coffee with it, plus K-Cups are incredibly convenient to use.
K-Cups tend to run cheaper than Nespresso pods, so you"ll likely save money in the long run by picking the Keurig K-Cafe SMART over a Nespresso machine. You can get K-Cups on sale at your local supermarket, or you can sign up for Keurig"s consumption-based subscription program. (You"ll save 25% on every order.)
The Keurig K-Cafe Smart is a really good choice for someone who loves regular coffee, iced coffee and easy-to-make cafe drinks. That said, if you"re looking for a machine solely to create the best coffeehouse drinks, you might want to consider a dedicated espresso machine such as a Nespresso instead. (CBS Essentials also recommends the 4.4-star-rated Instant Pot dual pod plus, which makes coffee from K-Cups and Nespresso pods.)
The Keurig K-Elite coffee maker makes a single cup of coffee at a time but features a 75-ounce water reservoir so you can make cups of coffee for everyone in your family. The device features a strong brew button, an iced coffee setting and hot water on demand perfect for making tea and hot chocolate this fall.
This mini coffee device is a great option for small spaces. The 5-inch-wide Keurig coffee makers lets you brew up to 12-ounces of coffee, hot chocolate, tea and more. It offers an energy efficient feature that automatically turns the coffee maker off 90 seconds after you"ve brewed your cup.
Make a cup of coffee for yourself or make a whole bunch of coffee for the house. This K-Duo coffee maker lets you brew both. The carafe can brew up to 12 cups of coffee. Want to wake up to the smell of coffee? You can even program the Keurig K-Duo coffee maker to automatically brew a carafe up to 24 hours in advance.
Make coffee with the press of a button. This simple Keurig K-Select coffee maker doesn"t include a bunch of fancy bells and whistles but it"s a classic. And it"s on sale.