Specialty Coffee Retailer is a publication for owners, managers and employees of retail outlets that sell specialty coffee. Its scope includes best sales practices, supplies, business trends and anything else to assist the small coffee retailer.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/60649
Singular success Single-cup brewing is one of the fastest-growing segments in coffee. Will the benefits transfer to traditionally brewed coffee? BY PAN DEMETRAKAKES S homes, machines like the Keurig K-Cup that brew cups from portion-packed pods are changing the way Americans routinely prepare coff ee. Th ey are greatly improving institutional coff ee—a segment much in need of improvement—but what implications does this have for specialty coff ee retailing? Single-serve coff ee is still a relatively small slice of the In offi ces, waiting areas, hotel rooms, and increasingly in ingle-cup brewing systems are taking hold in America, literally one cup at a time. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters hopes its new Vue single-serve brewer (left) will help maintain the market- share lead of its Keurig system. The Vue, like the Keurig, has proprietary pods. Meanwhile, Starbucks is coming out with its own single-serve system, the Verismo (right). an espresso machine. Th e alternative low-pressure systems are basically scaled-down versions of drip brewers. Th e three most popular pod-based systems are the Keurig market, standing at about 8 percent globally. And so far, it's mostly been confi ned to offi ce and other institutional settings. But it's growing, especially in American homes. Sales of single- serve coff ee have been rising an average of almost 29 percent a year, compared with 6 percent for conventional bulk coff ee. As of 2011, 7 percent of American homes had a single-serve brewer, and that fi gure has been growing by about 1 percentage point a year, according to the National Coff ee Association. Single-serve brewing systems, and the coff ee that goes into K-Cup, owned by Green Mountain Coff ee Roasters; the Nespresso, owned by Nestlé; and the Tassimo, with machines manufactured by Bosch and pods distributed by Kraſt Foods. Key patents for the K-Cup system are due to expire in September. Green Mountain is in the process of rolling out a new low-pressure system, called Vue, which can be programmed with diff ering pressure, temperature, portion size and other brewing parameters. A new player is just entering the market. Starbucks them, vary considerably in expense and quality. But they have one thing in common: Figured on a per-pound basis, the coff ee used in single-serve brewers is some of the most expensive a consumer can buy. For popular systems like the K-Cup and the Nespresso, it works out to $50 or more a pound—higher than almost all of even the highest-end varietals in a coff eehouse, and at least fi ve times the cost of most bulk specialty coff ee. Pretty much all of that extra money goes for processing and packaging—in other words, for convenience. Coff ee for single-serve brewers is invariably more expensive than bulk coff ee, but there is considerable variation in the brewers. Th e fundamental division is between systems that use paper packets for the individual coff ee servings, and those that use rigid pods made of plastic or aluminum. Th e latter are usually, but not always, for high-pressure systems that force hot water through coff ee grounds, using the same principle as 14 | April 2012 • www.specialty-coffee.com announced on March 8 the introduction of a high-pressure single-serve brewer called Verismo. Starbucks describes Verismo, to be manufactured by Germany's Krueger GmbH, as able to brew "both Starbucks-quality espresso beverages, from lattes to americanos, and brewed coff ee consistently and conveniently one cup at a time. diff erence between paper- and pod-based systems comes down to exclusivity. Plastic or aluminum pods must be shaped to fi t the machine, which means they're proprietary and have to be licensed. Because these rigid-material, proprietary pods are relatively From the standpoint of coff ee roasting and packaging, the " expensive, the coff ee in them tends to be of higher quality. Specialty coff ee roasters hope that single-serve systems, especially the high-pressure ones, will help consumers develop a taste for high-quality coff ee—and that they'll take the next logical step. "I think [single-serve] is a huge and growing market, and Verner Earls, sales and marketing director for Chauvin Coff ee Co. "It's a huge major market of its own out there, but I'm hoping the sales trickle down to us." SCR " says what I'm hoping happens is that once people get over the trendy part of that, they decide to continue their quest for a perfect cup of coff ee, and they're going to graduate to a grinder,