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Coming Soon: Self-Heating Coffee
prostoalex writes "In 2005 Wolfgang Puck will start selling containers of self-heating coffee, USA Today says. The combination of calcium oxide and water will heat the coffee to 145 degrees and keep it warm for the next 30 minutes. The coffee will be sold in regular grocery stores, and folks at Fool.com tell Starbucks to watch out as this product, coming from a well-known chef, might target those of us grabbing a cup of hot latte on the way to work."
Thats just scary though. I try to avoid ingesting things that are able to create their own heat.
Don't Tread on Me
I don't quite understand how that can be a time saver. My kettle takes about a minute. I do realize that I then need to be less productive in other areas for about the five seconds it takes to pour the water in the mug and stir.
*raises hand*
I'm addicted now, though. But I still love the taste, and moving from the halfway-decent coffee I usually drink to shitty cheapass Folgers coffee would be more torture than the money I would save would be worth.
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Of course, if the container were to split the coffee from the water until you heated it, it might not be so bad. But even that seems hardly different to me than buying some instant crap from a vending machine. Except of course the vending machine gives you a coffee instantly, rather than fumbling around in the cold trying to activate the device and then then waiting several minutes for it to be even drinkable.
As a Costa Rican, the idea of instant coffee is insulting, let alone self-heating coffee.
Every time I go home, I bring a few months' supply of 100% pure Arabica beans. Here in the US good coffee is insanely expensive.
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Meals Ready to Eat, the US Army's replacement for it's old rations, usually come with a similar contraption: a wafer of material which is massively exothermic when combined with water.
It comes in a bag; you add water and then stuff your entree into the bag. The water comes to a boil (or at least apparently; it may just be hydrogen evolving from the reation, and they tell you not to use it in an enclosed place). The food goes from room temperature to way-too-hot-to-eat in a few minutes.
They recommend two of them if the food starts off frozen, but I've found that one will take it from rock-solid to tolerable (the things were designed to be eaten room-temperature as well.) It's not exactly luxury food, but it's incredible to have have hot food available almost instantly without having to carry cooking equipment or starting a fire.
This is what bugs me. People have made snide comments before when I say I'm going to Starbucks or if I'm seen drinking Starbucks. They come out with all this crap about only going to look cool etc etc
Well guess what - it is the best cup of coffee I can get in the area and generally there are not many small, individual, coffee places where I live (Glasgow, Scotland) - not because of Starbucks/Costa, there never really were.
Yes there are a few, but they're either on the other side of the city or their coffee is no better than Starbucks. I don't care if Starbucks has this image, I refuse to get a crap cup of coffee in a polystyrene cup like a lot of other people do when I can get a far superior coffee from Starbucks. Yes there is better coffee in the world but I can't get it, so quit having a go at me for enjoying what I can get.
(Most of this wasn't aimed at you by the way, it's just a pet peeve of mine)
I concurr. Dunkin Donuts has really good coffee.
The founder of Starbucks had a business insight:
1. Sell cheap coffee for 4 bucks. 2. ??? 3. Profit!
Step two being: Yuppies will buy it just to feel cool.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
These ready-to-eat-at-any-moment solutions are just terrible. They always come with lots of plastic, tin-foil, etc. They shouldn't really be used in everyday life, but, because people are leading such frantic lives, working a lot and consuming way too much, they end up generating a lot of rubbish! If you go to McDonald's, your food could weigh less than all the plastic and paper that comes along with it! It's insane!
Same reason anything Linux or Apple does is compared to Microsoft. Starbucks and Microsoft both make crappy products with great marketing. Sure it's better if you grind your own(Linux), or visit the local non-chain coffeehouse (Apple), but when there's a Starbucks on every streetcorner (Microsoft's 90% market saturation), sometimes you just take the path of least resistance to get your fix(or work done).
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This will be a dud. It may have a niche market among hikers and campers, but that is about it.
People buy coffee at Starbucks because they like the ritual and the atmosphere. It is a kind of human contact that, although shallow, provides some satisfaction without there being any accompanying obligations. ( Am I supposed to wail at the alienation and isolation of the modern world here? Well, real relationships like we had in the good ol' days still exist, now we have something extra in addition to that. )
It's the same reason people would go to a cinema to see a movie, even if they could see it at home on a home theatre system that provided an equal quality presentation. It's the same reason that fast-food restaurants, and cafes like Starbucks, haven't been automated with machines replacing human help to the extent that they could be.
So it won't replace Starbucks cafes, and it won't be a quick-grab-a-cup convenience store seller either, because convenience stores sale brewed coffee already at a lower price.
Y'know, I've been to Tim Hortons, and while you've got a nice country and all, that place sucks. The coffee is weak and flavorless (at least our Dunkin Donuts has powerful coffee, even if it's not very good), and, while you didn't mention it, the actual doughnuts were horrid little dry paste things. We can get better from little glass cases in truck stops.
Now, that's not to say you don't have good coffeeshops -- Bridgehead in Ottawa is worth twenty Starbuckses any day.
Grocery store checkers around here are 'tarded slow.
Take a few minutes, grind your own at home. Have real coffee. Better and, wait for it... still faster!
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
I have to disagree with this. Starbucks is a marketing monster, but they also make a quality product. I'm sure a lot of people are predisposed to hate them no matter what they do due to their corporate policies, which is fine, but a lot of people who know and enjoy coffee do agree that Starbucks makes an above average cup. Comparing it to most of the local coffee places by me, I'd say they're up at the top - not the best, but up there.
As for cost, if you don't get a latte or other "complicated" drink, a simple cup of coffee at Starbucks is reasonably priced. Of course, not many people just get a coffee there, which is why they make so much money, but...
I'm thinking that the idea is that you would have purchased the product ahead of time. You could keep a stash in your car or your desk and whenever you felt like it you could grab one and drink one. This is pretty much how most quick snacks work too. If we had to go to the grocery store everytime you wanted a snack, we probably would have fewer people overweight...
I've been a DD drinker for a long time -- here in MA it's a bit hard to avoid it. But when I had my first Starbuck's I thought I had a bad batch. Way too burnt tasting.
I thought my tastes weren't sophisticated enough, and it was better coffee that I just hadn't appreciated yet.
Now, their frillyfrothycreamycandythingies aren't half bad. But most days I want a $1 cup a coffee, not a $5 dessert.
But I have to admit, sometimes it's a nice place to hang out. Just BYO coffee!
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
People go to Starbuck's so they can say they go there. And to be seen there.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but where do people think going to Starbuck's is a status-enhancing gimmick? The only place where this might work is East Podunk, USA. In most metropolitan areas the Starbuck's outnumber the Kwik-E-Marts and carry about the same cachet. They are appealing because a) they are absolutely everywhere [in most cities], i.e. convenient and b) the product is generally consistent across stores in different regions. (This also explains the success of chain restaurants in the US.)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
..in europe (at least in the UK; but nescafe are a european brand, so I'm guessing the stuff spread), but it was *terrible*. The stuff tasted disgusting, and if your can of coffee was cold to start with (as opposed to room temperature), it warmed up lukewarm; as I discovered when woken up on a signals exercise at 3 in the morning; I just ended up binning half a dozen cans and falling back to redbull to get my caffeine hit for the morning.
If you really really want lukewarm reheated instant coffee for the price of a latte at starbucks, great. For the rest of us, thermos flasks suffice (Or if you require masochism in your life, simply carry around a flattened paper cup with a few single-serving packets of instant coffee; just add lukewarm tap water, and you're good to go - and for a fraction of the price!)
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I could see it being popular with hunters, though. Having hot coffee in the deer stand without needing a big thermos could have some appeal.
OK, I'm stereotyping here a little, but I can't see the average hunter rushing out to buy something marketed by Wolfgang Puck.
More likely scenario: Someone who hasn't trimmed their fingernails down to the quick accidentally breaks it open, causing crippling third degree burns. After finding out that the company knew that this was a problem (from countless other similar accidents) but decided that keeping a corporate legal team was cheaper than redesigning the container, the customer managed to find a lawyer who hadn't sold their soul to a corporation. After that lawyer somehow manages to get the case into court despite the well-practiced tactics of the corporate team, a jury examines the evidence and awards the customers enough to pay their medical bills, plus a punitary award that seems large for an individual but is corporate pocket change. After multiple appeals by the corporate team, the settlement is whittled down to enough for the medical bills and free coffee for a year.
Meanwhile, politicians whose re-election coffers are fattened with corporate checks make a big deal about how "lawsuit happy" the country is, and -- once enough gullible people have bought into grossly exaggerated "examples" -- push for "tort reform". For some reason, "responsibility" isn't seen as a concept that should apply to corporations.
Without high quality, freshly roasted and freshly ground beans, your coffee is crap, no matter what you think.
Of these three components, freshly roasted is 90% of the difference between fresh-brewed evil and drinkable coffee.