STiR coffee and tea magazine

Volume 3, Number 1

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52 STiR tea & coffee industry international s unit sales exceed 15 billion per year the extraordinary demand for coffee capsules, filter pods and K-Cups is challenging the ability of equipment manu- facturers to supply roasters. The National Coffee Association's 2013 survey found that 19% of coffee drink- ers had a single-serve cup the previous day and that 12% of U.S. households own a single-serve brewer. American households consume 14 beverage servings a day. If you assume that four are coffee then 13.8 million households with single-serve brewers are already consuming as many as 55.2 million cups per day or about 1.6 billion per month. The world's largest capsule manufacturing plant, operated by Nestlé, produces 2.5 billion capsules a year — which is not nearly enough. A single machine filling and packing 500 aluminum or plastic capsules or filter pa- per pods per minute manufactures 48,000 in two shifts daily. A roaster would have to run this machine 360 days a year at double shifts for 58 years to make a billion capsules. Raising output to 1,500 capsules per minute per machine, it would still take two years producing capsules at a rate of 1.4 million per day to manufacture a billion servings — and that's just one blend. "The market for manufacturing machines to produce single-serve coffee prod- ucts is changing," according to Michael Erb, sales director of single serve solutions Extraordinary Demand Challenges Manufacturers Optima high speed capsule filling machine. A By Dan Bolton

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