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Here Comes the Keurig of Everything
Tekla Perry writes: Keurig made a huge business out of single-serving coffee machines. Now, as more complex machinery shrinks in size and cost, many companies are trying to duplicate that success for other types of food and drink. Startups are introducing the Keurig of cocktails, the Keurig of Jell-O shots, and the Keurig of dinner (it makes stir fries, stews, and risottos). The question is: does having a single- or limited-purpose device make really make sense for consumables that aren't coffee? Counter space is not infinite, and most people want more variety out of their lunches, dinners, and nightcaps than they do for their morning pick-me-up. (Also, let's retire this metaphor before we get a Keurig for cats.)
Yeah, everyone wants to be the next Keurig. Everyone who wants to pretend to know stuff without actually knowing anything at all. You know. Marketroids and the like.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There's plenty of room for competition when it comes to keurig-type machines and cats that would allow several companies to produce their own versions. Because everyone knows there's more than one way to skin a cat.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
A kitchen device that can only be used for one purpose is a waste of space.
>> does having a single- or limited-purpose device make really make sense for consumables that aren't coffee?
If you can find enough suckers to buy them and yield big profits, then yes. (See the original Keurig, for example.)
Just channel surf some night when you have insomnia. The infomercials selling specialty cooking hardware are on every channel. Sure, some are the "replace everything in your kitchen with this one device" but others a "why waste time doing it by hand when you can just use our device to do it easily in half the time"
Here's the thing it was a fad. There is a decent part of the populace that loves their Keurig's and would likely never give them up. For the mass majority of people that bought them, it was a one-time "look at my cool gadget I got" that not sits in a corner or on a shelf and collects dust. These may all become short term money making fads but they will be rarely used is my guess.
Nifty idea's for sure. Maybe it's not a fad. Is the George Foreman Grill a fad? I mean everyone and their sister has or had one at some point. It did great and still makes money but how much is it used?
Rambling for ramblings sake I guess. Also, why can't I login from the POST page. /. The best tag to represent /s
I insert a single serving of food held in a specialized plastic container, press a button, and a minute later I've got a meal. Mine even works with a variety of food brands.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Single serving all the things! From flashlights to kittens, all protected with base64 encoded, dual rot13 encrypted DRM goodness!
How did Keurig become the de-facto coffee maker? What about the Tassimo, the Nespresso, or one of the few other coffee makers out there?
I do not consume any of the thing these "single use" machine do. Nor will I. It's highly expensive for a single serving after all.
Regular coffee pot + 1 coffee bean grinder + 1 lb bag of beans = 1 possibly recyclable / compostable bag plus a hundred + cups of coffee.
Keurig setup + 1 kcup insert = 1 cup of crappy coffee plus an unnecessary environmental impact in the form of an non-reusable cup.
Why in this day and age are we engineering waste INTO products when we should be engineering waste OUT of the product? It doesn't make sense.
Everytime I look at these machines, all I see is the increased waste the 'convenience' causes.
What we really need is better recycling. We'd all like to see 'perfect' recycling ala the Star Trek replicator, but until we have need infinite free energy and a better understanding of manipulating atoms at the atomic scale automatically, I simply don't see this occuring anytime soon.
However, what we DON'T need is yet another kitchen top appliance that produces even more waste. The first world simply does NOT have the right to pollute the earth just because they are too lazy to cook a decent meal.
Coffeebots SUCK!
If you're not spending at least 40 minutes on your grind and brew ritual, you're just a philistine drinking gunky swill.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The Keurig worked in the market because most people already had a dedicated device for making coffee. The Keurig just replaced it with a different dedicated device to make it differently.
However, most poeple do not already have a dedicated device for making mixed drinks, jello shots, beer, stir fry, etc. Every one of those devices is going to eat into people's kitchen space, and for most people, that is EXTREMELY limited. I don't see many of these ideas taking off much beyond a niche market. though that's not necessarily a bad thing...companies can actually make a living off a niche market if they properly understand that's their market.
a Keurig of Keurigs?
Need to make dinner? Use your Keurig Keurig to make a dinner Keurig.
After dinner just throw away the dinner consumable and dinner Keurig consumable. Counter space a non-issue!
Or maybe it's easier to just start an Uber for Keurigs service...
Can someone provide a car analogy?
Why the @#$@ can't I get a home freestyle machine?
Seriously, I've even thought about getting the commercial one. I have a proper commercial tap for beer and fizzy water now.
..don't panic
Coffee, Tea (Sit back and think of England....), Baby Formula (for babies, obviously), Mixed alcoholic drinks, Soda - see Sodastream
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
With powdered alcohol I can see the cocktail one working, you have different pods for different drinks. The rest seem like a stretch.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
So, if we just add wifi we can have the Internet of Keurigs?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Mmmm, stir fried Jell-O
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Keurig coffee tastes like watered down dogshit. It's not like coffee was hard to make before.
It's a fad, and will be nothing but a memory in 10 years
"There is only one uni-tasker in the kitchen."
A fire extinguisher.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Unless and until we figure out how to prevent these little nuggets of plastic and steel from ending up in landfills and pacific garbage gyres, this needs to stop. These things not only generate an incredibly poor facimile of tea and coffee, but they cant be easily recycled. Vendors have also explored the concept of typing these things to DRM, meaning your coffee becomes a proprietary experience thats determined solely by a manufacturing conglomerate.
Just because we can, doesnt mean we should. Take a step back and -- if youre in the united states-- try brewing coffee with an american made coffee maker from Chemex. the thing is a work of art that lets you brew what you want, how you want. And at the end of the brewing the leftovers are completely biodegradeable.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So i see where this could be used for instant cocktails, especially since we will be selling powdered alcohol in the US this year.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5...
the other stuff does not appeal to me. bleah. however, set the Keuritty on the floor, let the cats pick what they want to eat by pushing the lever... that's no problem. I could do that machine. as long as it doesn't use those damn DRM containers.
running power to it would be another issue, but hey, I have a coil of 12/2-WG still begging to be opened...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This is horrible. Keurig coffee is crap, and it creates a huge amount of disposable waste.
Me, I have a small water boiler to get the water up to 208 degrees F, two grinders - a hand-turned grinder and an electric one for when I'm in a hurry and the noise isn't a problem, and a french press. I keep the coffee beans whole in a brown paper bag. Just grind, pour in a way that doesn't leave grounds floating above the water, and I can take the french press back to my desk and pour into a large mug in five minutes.
It's still simpler than a PBJ and I don't create a huge pile of plastic garbage. Jeez, will someone get the marketing departments some psychotherapy already?
We've got breaking news going on right now, guys. Rust 1.0 has been released!
Yes, kitchen counter space is limited. And toolbox space, and desks, and dressers, etc etc. Keurig has a functional niche (places where mess is intolerable or there's no one to clean it up, like medical lobby or a low-use office), but their marketing has convinced a broader market that it's too cool not to have one. It won't last. Already there's blowback about the amount of waste produced by this particular device, and popularity is waning... just like most other uber-popular single-use doohickeys.
In order to survive past initial novelty-driven sales, a single-purpose/non-flexible device had better be utterly awesome at what it does, and seriously durable in both function and regularity of need. That's why the regular pan stays while the egg-magic pan goes to Goodwill (not durable, don't want eggs every day), and virtually every Rolodex has been replaced by a free app on a general-purpose portable computing device (not flexible, need changed). The Keurig makes consistent mid-grade coffee (not awesome), and is moderately durable at best (and DRM is a form of intentional breakage), which means market survival will eventually come down to flexibility. Can JoeBob consumer make ramen with a Keurig? No? Then eventually he'll keep the kettle and throw out the Keurig.
'Jus sayin... as I sip decent coffee out of a mug, made with a 15yo Cuisinart kettle, an $0.80 sbux Via packet, and less waste/cleanup than Keurig. The packet will change, the kettle will stay.
I think not...(*poof*)
does having a single- or limited-purpose device make really make sense for consumables?
Fixed that for you. Single use devices never made sense for coffee either.
I'm 29, and I'm pretty sure single serving cocktails have existed without the need of a machine to dispense them for longer than that, and I know "the Kurig of Dinner" is a microwave oven, as TV dinners have been around forever.
More over-priced, wasteful products?
That asteroid can't strike soon enough....
#4 Melita size electric drip coffee maker Coffee bean grinder. The rest are either less specialized, hidden, or absent.
All your database are belong to U.S.
Multi-purpose devices make much better use of limited space, that huge, bulky single use devices like a keurig...
Yes, kitchen counter space is limited. And toolbox space, and desks, and dressers, etc etc. Keurig has a functional niche (places where mess is intolerable or there's no one to clean it up, like medical lobby or a low-use office), but their marketing has convinced a broader market that it's too cool not to have one. It won't last. Already there's blowback about the amount of waste produced by this particular device, and popularity is waning... just like most other uber-popular single-use doohickeys.
In order to survive past initial novelty-driven sales, a single-purpose/non-flexible device had better be utterly awesome at what it does, and seriously durable in both function and regularity of need. That's why the regular pan stays while the egg-magic pan goes to Goodwill (not durable, don't want eggs every day), and virtually every Rolodex has been replaced by a free app on a general-purpose portable computing device (not flexible, need changed). The Keurig makes consistent mid-grade coffee (not awesome), and is moderately durable at best (and DRM is a form of intentional breakage), which means market survival will eventually come down to flexibility. Can JoeBob consumer make ramen with a Keurig? No? Then eventually he'll keep the kettle and throw out the Keurig.
'Jus sayin... as I sip decent coffee out of a mug, made with a 15yo Cuisinart kettle, an $0.80 sbux Via packet, and less waste/cleanup than Keurig. The packet will change, the kettle will stay.
You could make ramen with a Keurig. I use one to make oatmeal in the mornings.
Fellow citizens! Do your part, and make waste. Life is easier when you lighten the load.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What's needed is a machine that can spit out single-purpose machines for specific kitchen tasks. When you're done with a given task, just throw the "made machine" into some kind of recycling port. There, it gets deconstructed into raw materials, for use in later single-purpose machines.
Alternatively, the same sort of thing could be done with food articles themselves. I'm going out on a limb here, but imagine some kind of large box in your kitchen that contains various raw materials in a temperature-controlled environment (preserving freshness). Nearby is an assortment of tools for cutting, scraping, scooping, mixing, heating, and serving the output. For novices, a set of instructions could be published for making various things out of the raw materials. Since the individual instruction sets aren't that complex, they could be conveniently grouped into some kind of housing small enough for a person to pick up and read, almost like an iPad or something. You could page back and forth until you find the item you want, follow the steps, use the tools, and viola, fresh and tasty food. What I like about this is that it offers a fair bit of flexibility, makes good use of resources, and the overall solution is space-efficient enough to provide a variety of food for an entire family while still fitting into a single room in a house.
Marketing plays a huge roll. Take the recent change in frozen vegetables. Everyone sells and buys the steam-able cook in bag veggies now. The process
- Take bag out of the freezer
- Place it in the microwave for 5 minutes
- Remove from microwave
- Open bag and dump into a bowl.
- Eat fresh steamed veggies.
They cost about 25-75% more than frozen veggies that are not in a steam-able bag. Here's the thing, you can do the same process with non steam-able veggies except your bowl needs a lid and the order is a little different.
- Take bag out of the freezer
- Open bag and place in a bowl and put some type of lid on it.
- Place it in the microwave for 5 minutes
- Remove from microwave
- Eat fresh steamed veggies.
People buy them at 25-75% more because they are more convenient!!! How much more convenient? Do people step back and look at this big picture? The only difference is a freaking lid on your bowl man. That lid could be a dinner plate sitting on top of your bowl, you can even use that dinner plate for that dinner and not have an extra one to wash, it will just be a little warmer than the other ones and maybe have some moisture on the bottom of it.
until the marketing-drones started killing it with DRM.
It's called the microwave oven.
A good rice cooker can cook lots more than just rice and is worth its weight in jade.
While it can do more, it's not super useful unless you cook a lot of rice. I have a rice cooker and I can use it to cook rice in an hour or I can get some Uncle Bens and do it on my stovetop in about 30 minutes. Guess which one I do more? Unless you are very fussy about your rice or do a lot of it a rice cooker is kind of a pain. Plus the interface on most of these things is pretty annoyingly complicated even for a geek like me with a pretty high tolerance for complexity.
It's called a crock pot.
Yeah, I put my frozen veggies in a mug and rest the dinner plates on top. 4 mins later and hot plates and veggies.
Keurig for cats already exists as the self-cleaning litter box
I am not going to buy these gizmos now. Next year they are going to add 3D printer to the food machines that will build your dish layer by layer, dot by voxel dot. I will look foolish owning last generation food gizmos.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Do not belong in a kitchen.
sometimes eggs make lizards, turtles or even snakes. it's kind of potluck
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A few years ago I bought a top-of-the-line Japanese rice cooker. It cooks any type of rice flawlessly, and easily allows me to specify in advance what time I want the rice to be ready. Yes, it takes up counter space, but it's an investment I appreciate every time I use it.
Call me when you can take a shit into that raw materials box.
Who uses bullets "on a daily or almost daily basis"?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I'll state up front that I agree: Keurig coffee isn't great. The beans were ground months ago, the amount of coffee isn't a lot, and it's pretty easy to do better.
Yet these machines fill a niche. There is a reason why they are popular, and that reason isn't "everyone but you is an idiot".
Several places the Keurig works:
A small office, where a conventional coffee maker would result in throwing away half-full pots of unused coffee. The Keurig contains the mess, so the office won't have coffee grounds everywhere. (If you work at an office where nobody ever makes a mess and leaves it for others to clean up, great! Get a real coffee grinder and something better than a Keurig!)
A small restaurant like a burger shack, where sometimes people order coffee but it's not that common. The Keurig is fast and the coffee will be better than most ways a burger shack could make coffee.
At home, for someone who values convenience more highly than saving money or having tasty coffee. Or, as a way someone who doesn't drink coffee can offer coffee to guests. (The K-cup capsules have a longer shelf life than fresh coffee beans.) Also a way for someone who normally doesn't drink decaf to keep a little bit of decaf around.
I don't own a Keurig and I don't want one. But I don't sneer too much at those who choose to own one.
P.S. If you run a burger shack and you want to serve coffee, look into the AeroPress. Not as convenient as a Keurig but convenient enough, and makes better coffee.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
What's the most expensive part of a Sodastream, the carbonation?
The flavors (per their estimate of 12 liters per flavor pack) are around 50 cents per liter, which is about the "on sale" price of most 2L bottles of soda. Canned soda is about 80 cents a liter (more or less depending on brand and price).
A friend bought a kit to fool around with and toyed with the idea of an adapter to use standard bottles of CO2.
He ended up really hacking it by abandoning the Sodastream carbonator itself and instead put schraeder valves in the caps of the Sodastream bottles and bought a 20 gallon CO2 tank off Craigslist. I think he's even gotten into converting 2L bottles to use with this.
My wife just tossed her Keurig, and she is so much happier. She had forgotten what it was like to wake up to the smell of brewing coffee,and able to get her 2-3 cups instantly instead of waiting for each cup. She does miss some of the flavors, but now is more likely to add a little cocoa to the grounds the night before, or toss in some fresh vanilla with her real cream.
So .. to keep on topic ... from my experience, most things that introduce a labor saving mechanism in the kitchen change the characteristics of the food. I make pizza dough in a stand mixer every week or two. Last week, I couldn't find the dough hook and made it by hand for the first time in months. It was so much better, the kneading that I did made a dough with better texture than the dough hook. Probably because as I knead, I can feel the dough and know when it's done. Now, to be fair, it could be that I just don't do it right with the dough hook. But .. since it produced a pizza dough that was serviceable, I didn't really care. At the time.
The hand grinders I used as a kid did a better job than the using the food processor, we had much more control and it produced far more consistent texture. It is far easier to over beat egg whites using a hand mixer than doing it by hand.
I appreciate the labor saving devices, and have a microwave, food processor, stand mixer, electric knife, and ice cream maker to name a few. I use them often. Love the ice cream maker, my wife won't even eat store bought ice cream anymore. But I kinda miss the hand cranked one, I just can't seem to get the same consistency that machine did.
For something special, I almost always drop back to doing it without them. I find there is a better connection to food for me when hand mixing, hand chopping, and hand shaping that I don't get letting a machine do it and just watching.
Several years ago, I spent time in India. While there, I got over the Western taboo of eating with my hands. I now find myself being watched at restaurants as I tend to still eat some of my meal with my hand, it somehow seems to make the experience more satisfying.
In our current mobile-phone addled society, I suppose the quality of the food isn't as important as it used to be. I admit that my wife and I tend to eat dinner with the TV on because the kitchen table usually has some project on it. We didn't use to when we first got married, I always made it a habit of turning that damn thing off because she is such a great cook.
Now, I'm not a food snob. Even though I appreciate good food, my wife and I also can enjoy fish sticks and Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner. I've been known to hanker for B&M baked beans and hot dogs and chastise my wife to not add anything to them; she is often tempted to 'tart them up' and make them her own.
Appreciating the difference between Gortons fish sticks and a hand grilled mahi mahi is not the same as turning ones nose up at Gortons. All food has flavor, and I have the opinion that if I feel food A is better than food B, it only pertains to me and no one else.
But I'm afraid that the more we move towards Keurig, the less people will know how food can really taste when done by hand. And they won't have the skills to do it when the zombie apocalypse finally hits.
Brain ceviche anyone???
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Just so you know, Nespresso is older and is actually known outside of the yoosah.
Keurig made a huge business out of single-serving coffee machines.
Then why have I never heard of them before this article?
What exactly is a Keurig of beer? Most beer I've seen already comes in convenient, single-serving packaging. Where does the need for a machine come in to play here?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
In a world where many seemed to be moving towards things being less disposable, I was shocked at this 'Keurig' thing to start with. More waste? More 'single use', throw-away, non-biodegradable food-related things? What the actual fuck? Seriously, there needs to be LESS of this sort of thing, not MORE of it, and I'd be happy to see this whole 'K-cup' thing go away for good. Get a decent French press and make your coffee that way, it's 100% reusable and makes excellent coffee to your specification, and they're inexpensive. Want only one cup? They make little French presses that are appropriate for a single serving. Everything else this article is about? Screw that, make your own cocktails and whatever else the way they've always been made, there's NO reason to change it. Stop being lazy, people! We don't need more shit in landfills!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Would this Keurig be good or evil? Would it create tiny fluffly kittens, or would it lure cats near and then tase them to death?
Why is your rice cooker the only one on the planet that takes longer to cook rice than the standard method?
Rice cookers don't accelerate the process of cooking rice. They make it consistent and (hopefully) easy but they don't speed it up, at least not with any rice cooker I've ever owned or used. If you make rice with most meals I think a rice cooker is a worthwhile investment. I own one (a gift) but I rarely use it because frankly it's more trouble than the benefits justify.
Rice cookers are also brilliant at making slow cooked oatmeal (rolled or steel cut), which is the only kind worth eating.
I get perfectly satisfactory results on a stovetop which requires no special equipment. Rice cookers can do a fine job of course but I certainly wouldn't buy one just to make oatmeal and I don't eat enough rice to justify taking up the counter space. Your mileage may vary of course.
You bought the wrong rice cooker. The good ones cost less than $10, and go inside your microwave oven. They cook perfect fluffy rice everytime, in exactly 23 minutes.
Or I can do it on my stovetop in about the same amount of time and get perfectly satisfactory results every time. Or if I really care I can pull out my electric rice cooker and use that but I find that to rarely be worth the bother.
Frankly anything that takes 23 minutes in a microwave is a misuse of the microwave.
You forgot that he does allow for 1 uni-tasker. The fire extinguisher. Then the anniversary special came around and he created an alternate use for that as well....
I'm as much a fan of Alton Brown as most people here but I think the "unitasker" rule is a silly one if you really insist on it. There is nothing wrong with a labor saving and/or performance enhancing unitasker (also called a specialty tool) if you use it regularly. Some tools are single purpose but they do that purpose REALLY well. If it is something you will use with some regularity and the tool actually makes the job meaningfully easier there is nothing wrong with specialty tools.
The problem is with special purpose tools that don't actually make a better product or save time. Those are a waste of money and kitchen space.
"There is only one uni-tasker in the kitchen."
No tool is truly a uni-tasker unless you lack imagination. That said I disagree with Alton Brown on this point. There is NOTHING wrong with a specialty tool, provided that it either saves significant time or does a better job and if you will actually use it with some regularity.
I thought that was the purpose of buffet ? As many single servings as needed and it don't clutter the kitchen.