K-Cups
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| Product type | Brewing systems Beverage pods |
|---|---|
| Owner | Keurig Green Mountain |
| Country | U.S. |
| Introduced | 1998 |
| Previous owners | Keurig, Inc. |
| Website | Keurig.com |
Keurig /ˈkjʊərɪɡ/ is a beverage brewing system for home and commercial use. It is manufactured by the American company Keurig Green Mountain, which is headquartered in Waterbury, Vermont. The main Keurig products are: K-Cup pods, which are single-serve coffee containers; other beverage pods; and the proprietary machines that brew the beverages in these pods.
Keurig beverage varieties include hot and cold coffees, teas, cocoas, dairy-based beverages, lemonades, cider, and fruit-based drinks. Through its own brands and its partnership licensed brands, Keurig has over 400 different varieties and over 60 brands of coffee and other beverages. In addition to K-Cup pods it includes Vue, Rivo, K-Carafe, and K-Mug pods as well.
The original single-serve brewer and coffee-pod manufacturing company, Keurig, Inc., was founded in Massachusetts in 1992. It launched its first brewers and K-Cup pods in 1998, targeting the office market. As the single-cup brewing system gained popularity, brewers for home use were added in 2004. In 2006 the publicly traded Vermont-based specialty-coffee company Green Mountain Coffee Roasters acquired Keurig, sparking rapid growth for both companies. In 2012 Keurig's main patent on its K-Cup pods expired, leading to new product launches, including brewer models that only accept pods from Keurig brands.
From 2006 to 2014 Keurig, Inc. was a wholly owned subsidiary of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. When Green Mountain Coffee Roasters changed its name to Keurig Green Mountain in March 2014, Keurig ceased to be a separate business unit and subsidiary, and instead became Keurig Green Mountain's main brand. In 2016 Keurig Green Mountain was acquired by an investor group led by private-equity firm JAB Holding Company for nearly $14 billion.
Keurig founders John Sylvan and Peter Dragone had been college roommates at Colby College in Maine in the late 1970s. In the early 1990s Sylvan, a tinkerer, had quit his tech job in Massachusetts, and wanted to solve the commonplace problem of office coffee – a full pot of brewed coffee which sits and grows bitter, dense, and stale – by creating a single-serving pod of coffee grounds and a machine that would brew it. Living in Greater Boston, he went through extensive trial and error trying to create a pod and a brewing machine. By 1992, to help create a business plan, he brought in Dragone, then working as director of finance for Chiquita, as a partner. They founded the company in 1992, calling it Keurig; Sylvan later said that the name came from his having "looked up the word excellence in Dutch".
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