K-Cup creator John Sylvan regrets inventing Keurig coffee pod system (2015) | Hacker News Reader

K-Cup creator John Sylvan regrets inventing Keurig coffee pod system (2015)

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39 pointssogen64 comments

I'm not surprised by their popularity.

I'm going to set aside coffee quality for a second - because the truth is, the average consumer doesn't seem to care about this beyond a certain threshold, which judging by the popularity of these Keurig and Keurig-like products, the options clearly meet - and I want to focus on what it delivers.

What it delivers is consistency. You put a pod in, fill up the water as needed, and press a button. Rinse and repeat, and you always get the same specified amount of coffee. Its precision consistent. No making a big pot of coffee only to waste it.

Not to mention, its simple to clean up. Just throw the pod away. No grounds, no coffee filters, just pop the pod, and on to the next one.

As far as convenience goes, it hits all the notes.

It may not for you, of course, but the average consumer is still buying these systems and its only growing.

Given how cheap it is to make these systems, I'm really not shocked it went to the consumer relatively quickly and didn't settle as an office only thing.

Now, they are an environmental catstrophe, that is true, and thats a great reason to transition away from these systems

Consistency is/was one of the main selling points of starbucks. They famously burn their espresso shots, which leads to a more consistent flavor.

They make those re-usable K cups, which I've never used and can't speak to how well they function or reduce waste. But I suppose they were never as popular to buy and use because then you have to do all of the things about making coffee that make it less desirable than just dropping by Dunkin Donuts on the way to work.

I use a re-usable K cup. Its still very convenient. I grab a clean one, add grounds, install in the machine and get my coffee. When I get multiple coffees in a day, I just dump and re-use the same K-cup. Its still really convenient.

That sounds less convenient than putting in a disposable paper filter into a machine and dumping grounds into it, adding water, then brewing 4-6 cups at once.

Maybe you have to wait a little longer, but you don't have to worry about cleaning and adding grounds.

Or a moka pot: unscrew, fill water up to the valve, fill coffee in the basket, screw it all back, brew your coffee.

Note also that paper filters are recyclable and compostable.

Same. Disposability and waste is false convenience with externalities.

superautomatics provide similar benefits with less environmental impact.

Unfortunately, most people prefer the lower up-front cost and higher operational cost of a Keurig or a Nespresso to the higher up-front cost and lower operational cost of a superauto.

I think more importantly, K-Cups can be stored for long periods of time.

If you are not a daily coffee drinker, and you want to make coffee with the same infrequency you use all of your other kitchen gadgets, your grounds will be stale between cups.

That’s why I use mine. Grab Costco pod, cup, done. I can go usher the kids off to school.

And the coffee is pretty good.

I’ve honestly not made coffee any other way.

I did some research recently on K-cups vs Nespresso pods. One thing I found was that none of the official Keurig machines heat water to the optimal temperature for brewing coffee (around 195-205 F).

There are a few third party brewers that will hit that level, but I’m very curious why Keurig itself doesn’t offer one. Maybe safety/liability?

Also, whereas every Nespresso machine brews the pods basically the same, the Keurig machines vary widely in terms of brewing temperature, so you have to be careful which one you buy.

Honestly, I started biased towards Keurig but came away with the conclusion that, if you really want capsule coffee, the only reasonable choice is Nespresso. The original Nespresso pods are an open ecosystem with third party pods so that would be my recommendation.

Why not get a normal espresso machine or automatic coffee machine? Why would you ever want to coffee pods?

A real coffee machine almost certainly makes better quality, but requires more effort. A pod based system makes mediocre to decent coffee easily and consistently. And in a small amount.

Using a drip coffee machine usually means making way more coffee than I'll drink, even though I'd love to own a machine named Mr. Coffee.

If you only want one or two cups, a stovetop maker might be a good alternative. Slightly more work, but less waste.

Exactly, a decent moka pot will brew pretty good coffee for just the cost of water, heating, and the coffee itself. Cleaning is easy, and they'll last generations in a family.

Coffee pods are expensive, wasteful, and not even that tasty...

I just press button to get better than Starbucks coffee for literally 0.35$ (premium coffee beans). Modern automatic coffee machine take really no effort. My De'Longhi Primadonna S Evo made 2094 coffees in last 4 years.

That particular coffee maker starts at approximately $500 USD[0] and seems to go for closer to $1000. Maybe in Europe its cheaper (not sure where you are based) but that is not the market of a Keurig or even Nespresso customer

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=De%27Longhi+Primadonna+S+Evo...

Pod themselves are often more expensive than coffee beans. Over time it would be cheaper to own coffee machine.

If someone is price sensitive then small drip machine, stove moka pot or aeoropress would be cheaper.

I thin only legitimate case for coffee pods is when you are not drinking coffee but want to serve to guests.

There are drip machines that will make one cup and even if you had the roaster grind the beans for you, it would probably be far, far better than anything you can get for a Keurig.

Brewing standard espresso for a few years now, I can see how it's a completely different value proposition.

They'll probably want to grind their own beans as well, and while the results are far far tastier, it's also a whole ceremony with finicky adjustements. There's that weird pressure telling to not be lazy and settle on worse pre-grind stuff, but thing is people are actually lazy so it becomes a friction point.

A fully automated machine solves that issue, but then they're huge, expensive, you're stuck with one variety of coffee at a time and any part that breaks means you repair the whole thing.

I have one for guests. I grind my own beans and make cold brew concentrate for myself, but I’ve found that guests are typically more comfortable with the pods.

> Why would you ever want to coffee pods?

For other people in the household.

Relationship lubricant - a simplified morning workflow for your caffeine deprived family members. win.

People shit on them, but they really are easier and more convenient.

Many regular automatic coffee machines are terrible at maintaining proper brewing temperatures as well. I think they’re just designed to be an inexpensive convenience product for a not-especially-discerning customer base. Nespresso is marketed as a premium product and the starting price of a Nespresso is like 3x that of a Keurig.

Personally I find Nespresso compares way better against decent regular espresso than Keurig does to decent regular drip coffee. Most Keurig coffee I’ve had has been dreadful–I’d rather drink gas station coffee or instant instead.

Possibly because it either costs more for a more powerful heating element or takes longer?

Nespresso has an advantage in the way it works as it's a pressure system. Coffee vs. Espresso.

Use a moka pot instead, it's also a pressure system. And probably much better at it than the cheap electronics of a Nespresso.

I've used pretty much every coffee system you can imagine at this point.

Moka pots are pretty fussy as far as temp control and can be quite messy. A Nespresso is far more convenient (and IMO much better than a Keurig is to coffee). I do love Moka pots and French presses as very cheap, old tech ways of making coffee that I think are nearly as good as very pricy methods.

> Moka pots are pretty fussy as far as temp control and can be quite messy.

The best method I've found so far is to use a kettle to pre-boil the water, or get it to almost boiling at 85-90C if you have a temperature controled kettle, and then just finishing the brewing on the stove top. Almost no chance of burning the ground coffee, it's really quick to cook, and the water temperature seems to stay where it should, at least for my taste.

Don't get me wrong, it's easy for me. It's just not in the same vicinity of ease of use as a pod machine, ie. it's going to be a learning curve for most. It's not something I'd expect my elderly parents would be able to do it.

I just wish we never would have stigmatized instant-coffee.

I drink a pot of coffee a day from my Moccamaster, but when I'm travelling I would much rather have instant coffee than use one of those flavorless, stale pods.

Instant coffee stores better and is better for the environment. Snobs let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Instant is great. You can also buy higher quality instant coffee these days at a fraction of the cost of ground beans (the down market options get pretty bleak). I have taken to bringing instant in to work simply because it is substantially better than the numerous poorly maintained machines in the office.

Interesting fact:

> In China, instant coffee accounts for more than 50% of the Chinese coffee market, compared to only around 8% in the U.S.

https://thechinaproject.com/2022/12/29/chinas-instant-coffee...

I don't drink much coffee at all but I love using instant coffee to make coffee-flavored things.

Starbucks tried to bring it back, but they didn't want to eat into their bottom line, so their offerings were high quality but expensive.

Yeah I don't get it, I have used a pour over for like my entire adult life. Can do a single cup or pot. Takes a few minutes to grind the beans and heat the water.

The only way this sort of stuff stops if you hit all plastic production with a hefty tax to reflect the actual true total-cost-of-ownership including recycling and the inevitable failure to recycle.. The externality cost is near infinite - once it hits the ecosystem it isn't really possible to remove and causes long term health impact to all future civilization but I'd settle for like 10xing the price..

FYI, you should just assume that plastic isn't being recycled, even if you put it in the recycling bin.

[2015]

*K-Cup creator John Sylvan regrets inventing Keurig coffee pod system* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18718039 (December 19, 2018 — 243 points, 339 comments)*

Is it crazy to think that there should be some kind of governmental review process for _new_ products that generate tons of plastic waste? I'm imagining a consumer product version of the FDA. They'd look at something like Keurig and argue that maybe home and office coffee production is solved problem and maybe we don't need this new "innovation."

I understand that people have strong feelings about government in general so maybe some other process?

There are so many new consumer products that it is hard to see how this would not grind the official economy to a halt due to scaling issues and create a grey/black market of unapproved goods. Drug approvals are rare and expensive.

Where do you draw the line? Is the little old lady at the flea market selling tchotchkes supposed to be subject to this? The small business owner doing imports for an immigrant community? Etc.

Taxes on packaging, similar to the e-waste model to push the external costs back onto the manufacturer and force them to build it into the retail price.

Allow manufacturers and retailers to avoid it by participating in bottle-return-deposit style recycling schemes.

We need to make selling the disposable part of consumables expensive.

On the surface it sounds good. But imagine regulatory capture of this mechanism, now corporate interests could weaponize it to prevent products of competing companies from even being authorized.

I think it should be more of a Department of Growth and Global Scale. Most things are fine to make thousands of, maybe even millions. It's when you start shipping billions of units, or when it becomes part of the social infrastructure, that you need to pay close attention to these externalities and secondary effect. But of course you need to do that before you get to that point, so you build the right tooling and processes and designs to benefit all of civilization and creation.

Some people, when they see a problem, think “I’ll use a new bureaucracy.” Now they have two problems.

There is a government restriction on plastic waste and it's passed onto consumers - it's the cost of garbage disposal.

The secret is that the cost of disposing of plastics into landfills is really, really cheap. Cheaper even than producing them. So the cost is pretty miniscule.

I'm all for taxing externalities and making consumers pay for their environmental damage, but there's not a strong case that plastics properly disposed of have a huge environmental impact.

I say ban all the plastic. If even 1% of is disposed of improperly, you get a deluge of plastic litter that accumulates in the environment. I've picked up hundreds of bags of this stuff, personally. "Properly disposed of" bothers me, because I've seen far too much of accumulating in ditches, waterways, roadsides, etc, to ever believe that fairly tale. People are trash monkeys and will. not. dispose. of. it. properly.

What about the impact of their manufacture?

Also when you try to price externalities purely by charging for disposal, you get illegal dumping.

Why is the popularity baffling? Nespresso had already been around for over a decade, and at the time the Keurig came to be, was making inroads to the consumer space. Granted this wasn't in the US market, but still there was precedent for a similar concept gaining consumer traction.

Also the article does a massive disservice to Sylvan, making it sound like he was an employee. He was primary founder of Keurig that divested shortly before it went to market.

No doubt these are an environmental abomination, however there are a growing number of recycling services. In the UK/Europe at least they can be collected at the same time as your kerbside recycling. The scheme is paid for by the coffee manufacturers themselves.

I enjoy good coffee and don't mind to occasionally use a proper coffee machine at the office, but at home K-Cups are perfect for me in terms of convenience-to-quality.

Bought $7 reusable pods on Amazon which make it slightly less convenient but environmental friendly and cheaper

Bad coffee, terrible for the environment. The title should have the (8 year old) publishing year appended.

IMO, it's unexceptional but adequate coffee rather than bad coffee.

In an office setting, I often want a warm mug of something caffeinated and vaguely coffee-flavored, with little ceremony or fuss. Keurig delivers well against that bar.

Adequate is the key word here. The company I work for has two office in the same city, one has a Keurig and the other has a large drip coffee brewer and a large can of Folgers. The pods are always drinkable, while the drip coffee will vary depending on who brewed it and there is a good chance it will either be far to strong or far to week depending on the amount of grounds put in.

No, it is terrible. Most instant coffee is better. National fast food coffee is better at this point. Good coffee is worlds better.

If you set the bar low enough, there's no limits to how happy you can be!

I have more lifehacks for you if you want :)

same for nespresso cups, it literally only has downsides. stale coffee, dead foam, waste of the cup, but even more insane if you think of all the shipping and production that needs to be done. They dont even get to the proper extraction temperature/pressure.

i bought a sage barista express and its literally the best thing i've bought in the last 4 years. Making a good cup of coffee takes around 3/4 minutes if you take the milk foaming into account. Shorter if you do espresssos. Takes a bit of practice though, < 2 weeks .

I googled sage barista express and was like, "that looks like a Breville." Turns out it's the same thing. Yes, they're excellent machines and last a very long time. Don't actually require that much time, but they require the cleanup that causes issues in office settings.

PS: Nespresso capsules taste infinitely better than most K-cups and are at least completely recyclable-- the vendor even provides the prepaid shipping bag for them.

Also, those coffee pods are expensive.

They are about 10X the cost of bulk pre-ground coffee like Folgers.

For anyone tempted to bad mouth Folgers, try opening one of your K-cups and look at the ingredients inside.

You do want to know what you're drinking don't you? Some of them are not just pre-ground but pre-brewed crystals --- aka instant coffee.

All the Keurig machine does is add water. You can empty some of K-cups into a mug, add water and heat it in the microwave with the same results.

I'm one of those weirdos who owns an espresso machine and buys very high quality (expensive) beans to use in it. Per cup of coffee, K-cups are more expensive than what I buy, for subpar coffee at best.

Nothing weird about paying more for superior quality.

Keurig is the polar opposite of this ... in the most exploitive way possible.

I'm sure he regrets it even further now! I can only imagine the mountains of pollution.

An alternative is teaching people how to make simple chains of byproducts. Maybe even incentivizing doing so.

I make a shot of Ristretto every morning from fresh beans in a hopper that's sealed by double layer gaskets. From that I get pucks of coffee grinds which I feed to my worms. 3 months layer with some nitrogen sources I get fresh compost for my plants. I have some ornamental plants, but the ones in my greenhouse grow things like tomatoes, lemons, basil, thyme, etc... To be frank, you don't even need a greenhouse for most of these; adding light and water to counter top plants will often do.

He can't understand explain their popularity.

He then immediately goes on to entirely understand and then explain their popularity.

"Sylvan said he thought the product might have some limited appeal to people who would normally go Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts or other coffee chains in the morning, because now they could get a cup of coffee at work that was cheaper, faster, and no fuss."

Yea.. you _nailed_ it. So, what's the problem? Oh:

"As the man who invented them, Sylvan might have been pleased with their popularity. But he left the company in 1997, selling his ownership of the product for $50,000."

Ah.. this isn't so much a "lack of understanding" as it is a defense mechanism against sour grapes.

Then they both go on to wring their hands over this "unsolvable" issue. Meanwhile, reusable K-Cup pods exist, work just fine, and entirely eliminate the "problem" here.

This article isn't designed to inform, it's designed to fruitlessly whine.

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