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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."
Indeed it is :-)
t ml for more info
See http://www.dolphin.soton.ac.uk/June2001/nescafe.h
We've had this for a long time in the UK. Or at least I saw this for the first time three years ago; I haven't seen it recently. I tried it twice, and both times it didn't seem to get very hot, although I did follow the instructions.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
This has been tried now on more than one occasion in the UK, most recently by Kenco, I think, but previously by PG Tips with tea (again, my memory my fail me on this) but I think this has now been on the market for more than four years on and off, as I remember trying it while at university! FWIW, the coffee is better than the tea, but with the ubiquity of Starbucks etc... how desperate can you really be for a cup?
Starbuck's is ok, but I always got the impression that they are the big name because of marketing and locations rather than having a really great product. Why are they always the benchmark that everyone tries to meet or beat? Their coffee is ok, but nothing special. If you can find a local coffee shop that roasts beans on site and grinds them fresh for your cup, you'll get a much better cup of coffee, potentially cheaper than starbucks.
As for this coffee in a can... Well, I can't imagine how good it would really be. It will probably be ok, given that it's going for a lattle, most likely flavored and sweetened. I don't think this could work for a plain old cup of coffee, but for a coffee drink with milk and flavoring it will probably mask enough of the stale coffee flavor to be drinkable.
Now why don't they take this tech an use it with soup? In fact why didn't they do soup first? After all if you are essentially just reheating coffee it will probablyt taste like crap, but re-heated soup doesn't often taste much worse than when it starts.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
The point of Starbucks (or, in Minnesota, Caribou and Dunn Bros.) was never the coffee. You can get coffee anywhere. Every office has coffee, and there are plenty of coffee vending machines.
The point of coffee shops is leaving the office for ten or twenty minutes.
Most Americans are non-smokers, so making a "coffee run" is one of the few excuses the typical American worker has for getting out of the building for a little while. It's a six-dollar mini-vacation.
So I don't think the executives at Starbucks are losing sleep over cold coffee that you re-heat with hand warmers built into the can.
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.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Nescafe Hot was a flop. "In 2002, Swiss beverage maker Nestle SA tested a self-heating can holding its Nescafe Hot When You Want coffee in England. But the company ended the trial run after several months, finding the can did not heat the liquid to a consistent temperature, said Nestle spokesman Francois-Xavier Perroud. "It didn't pan out," he said. Nestle is still interested in the idea, which it believes will be popular with consumers, but it is "not aware of a self-heating can that lives up to our expectations,"
Nescafe marketed these sorts of drinks s few years back, but as the above poster says, they were basically just warmed up cold coffee, and tasted like it too. Plus, you didn't get much, god only knows what the enormous containers did to the environment, and they cost far too much.
They were withdrawn from sale shortly after introduced, due to lack of popularity.
Dunkin Donuts has some of the best coffee I've ever had in the United States. It beats the pants off of Starbucks. If only they had a cooler marketing campaign and a better atmosphere in the stores they could really give Starbucks something to worry about.
I agree that DD coffee is some of the best available at a retail chain in the United States. But it's not great coffee in an absolute sense - it's a very light roast, it's very mild (which makes it a good everyday cup), some would even say weak. But it's far better than Starbucks, which is bitter and burnt - their fans like to say it's just a dark roast, but it's not. It's bitter; the roast is as dark as it is to try to mask the fact that they're not using very good beans.
I think you underestimate DD's popularity in the United States, though. It's far more popular in most of the northeast than Starbucks is. Starbucks has made some big inroads in New York and New Jersey over the past 10 years but it's hit a plateau now, and there are still a lot more DD's here than there are Starbucks.
One of DD's problems, though, is that they're franchised. So they're very inconsistent. The decor is pretty standardized (and they actually have updated to better compete... but they are a donut shop after all), but standards of cleanliness, customer service, and even the quality of the coffee itself is very uneven from store to store. I've actually complained to the DD company about this because the store nearest to where I used to live had to be about the worst DD in the entire nation - a cup of coffee there was really not much different than a cup of hot, cloudy water. Their employees, most of whom are not native to this country, also seem to have basically no coffee training and do not understand standard coffee terms like "regular" or "light" - you have to explain exactly what you want every time, and they still almost never get it quite right. This drives me crazy. They really need to institute some sort of company-wide training program.
But DD's marketing I think is actually pretty good - they've beaten the pants off Krispy Kreme (which is their main competitor, not Starbucks) by focusing on the coffee rather than the donuts, and they've always got new coffee drinks coming out on a seasonal basis (though most of them are undrinkable if you ask me - those "lattes" they have almost make me want to throw up). So they're doing okay.
But what they do well is regular, plain old every day coffee, nothing else, and the people who drink their coffee and like it are just not the same people who find Starbucks coffee tasty. DD's customers are a lot more blue-collar (even if they're really white-collar, like me), they don't care about having wi-fi with their coffee, they don't equate "bitter" with "good", they don't use the word "grande" when they really mean "medium", they don't need to pay four bucks for a cup-o-joe. So I think DD will probably pretty easily manage to co-exist with Starbucks; in the areas where both exist, DD is actually doing better right now.
(Of course, here in New York, we've got really good "real" coffee shops where you can get a nice, dark roast that's not bitter at all... so if you like your Starbucks, you can have that style of coffee the way it's supposed to be. But again, people who want that are not really Dunkin Donuts type customers anyway.)