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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.)
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"
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?
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.
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
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?
We use ours at least once, sometimes twice a week..Especially now that we got one with removable, dishwasher-safe plates.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Can someone provide a car analogy?
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?
We use ours at least once, sometimes twice a week..Especially now that we got one with removable, dishwasher-safe plates.
I find they work pretty well for grilling burritos mine gets used several times a week as well.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
"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
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?
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.
Your Marklar is marklar! What a marklar, you.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I have loads of kitchen space and none of these bullshit devices is welcome.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
My favorite single use kitchen appliance of all time was the Presto Hot-Dogger. Something about the beauty of simplicity combined with being inches away from a mini-electrocution chamber that I can't find in today's boring appliances.
Only in America. Go anywhere else and it will be "Keurig-what?". Thank goodness for the first sentence of the summary, the title would otherwise be incomprehensible in the rest of the world. Keurig wasn't even the first, Nestle (Nespresso) and Lavazza at least were there first.
I'm not sure how a rice cookers interface can be that complicated. Mine has an on/off button and keep warm. You put in rice and water in the appropriate ratio, press the on button, and then go do whatever the hell you want for the 15 minutes to an hour it takes to finish. The timer it takes depends on how much rice you put in and what type, brown rice taking the longest in my experience.
In my experience cooking rice on the stovetop sucks. It needs constant tending and is easily burned if you get distracted at the wrong time. My wife thought it was a silly thing to purchase at the time until we had used it exactly once. Perfect rice every time you use it, with the bonus that you can safely focus on other tasks while the rice cooks. And even once the rice is done cooking you can keep on doing other things until you can get to the rice because the cooker won't burn the rice.
Holy crap it actually exists.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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.
Is your cat Pusheen?
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.
The Chinese don't really know very much about rice. That's why the purpose of other dishes in Chinese cuisine is to help the rice go down.
The Japanese are the real rice connoisseurs. In Japanese cuisine, rice is a thing of worship, probably as an artifact of the Shinto religion where everything has a soul. A Japanese person will tell you that their domestic rice is the best, followed by California rice. But to the Chinese, rice is rice.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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.
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!