Single Serve Coffee Forums

I am not buying any K-Cups from anybody at the current raised prices. I am not throwing away my brewers yet but hope that something will happen to bring the price back down a a reasonable level. I mostly love the convenience at work; whether I can do a K-Cup at home or not is just a matter of whether or not I want to pay for extreme laziness for a quick cup.

So anyway I thought the news I just saw was kind of interesting, even though it is not today's groundbreaking headlines. If K-Cup patents expire, will everybody be offering K-Cups, or is it going to be a passing craze as people who want convenience switch en-masse to the lower-cost pods? Nobody is too happy or guilt-free about wasting a little cup of plastic with each short cup of coffee, now of course if a K-Cup would be capable of giving me a nice, strong, 16-oz cup of non-burnt coffee I would probably continue to buy them for the office, but as it is, enough is enough.

When I was using both pods and K-Cups I really stayed more with K-Cups because the light to medium roast pods I bought never quite made it to that 'just-right taste' that I get from a few of my favorite K-Cups. I quit pod-shopping completely for the time being.

Just my rambling thoughts on my Saturday-morning-with-no-K-Cups .... (sigh)
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2011/10/17/is-it-time-to-short-green-mountain-coffee-hedgie-david-einhorn-thinks-so/

“Capital spending is growing much faster than the business,” Einhorn reportedly said.

There are more problems for Green Mountain, though, as its product didn’t escape Einhorn’s criticism either. The company will face the expiration of the patent for its widely used K-cups, possibly losing pricing monopoly in September 2012, the hedgie said according to Trade the News.

I think the patent expiration issue is over stated. The brewer and k-cup are each protected by multiple patents. One of the k-cups patents is expiring next year. But there are others in place primarily in respect of non obvious changes that were made to the k-cup since the first patent was filed. Third parties releasing k-cups will need to be carefull not to infringe the other patents. It will also cost a lot to manufacture so we may not really see cheaper k-cup knock offs. With the release of the Rogers One Cups that are designed around the patent, the prices we are seeing for them are not that much cheaper than k-cups.

Yea, I dont think you will see a real price fall with k-cups... Pods are still the way to go.