Keurig are planning digitally managed coffee

The single cup craze has been gathering momentum for several years now and has become a lucrative portion of the home-based coffee industry. The traditional heavy hitter in this area, Green Mountain with its Keurig brewers and K-Cup pods, have run on a business model that sees profits in refills and not so much margin on the machines. Much like the ink in a traditional inkjet printer, for example.

However, recently, unlicensed companies have been able to jump on this bandwagon and offer third-party pods thanks to the expiration of some crucial patents in 2012. That meant that customers were no longer locked in and high-profile brands such as Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts could be circumvented. It didn’t help Green Mountain that these generic K-Cups retailed at a much lower price.

To combat this, Green Mountain announced that the much-anticipated Keurig 2.0 – which will be released later this year – will utilise ‘interactive technology’ that locks out competitors’ pods.

It’s the coffee equivalent of digital rights management (DRM).

DRM entered the public consciousness when they were implemented with digital music or video files that resisted their owners efforts to share or copy them in a bid to reduce piracy. Whilst that trend has died off – partly due to the rise of streaming services and the rise of iTunes – it is still quite prominent in the software industry. Now that process is transferring from your computer to your coffee maker.

For Green Mountain the move is a no-brainer: it secures and protects profit margins, all that they need to do in make sure that people upgrade and they get complete control over what goes in and what comes out of their coffee machines.

But – and there is always a ‘but’ in tales like this – with the implementation of software the danger of ‘hacked’ machines rise.

If ‘smart refrigeration units’ can send spam e-mails, then it’s pretty much a given that with some time, so can manipulated Keurig Machines. And then there’s the potential for their DRM to be bypassed, making them effectively ‘open source units.’

Whilst the general public may not be up in arms about this move, not yet at least, the introduction of digital technology is just another step towards the complete ‘smartification’ of our lives: Smartphones, smartwatches, smartcars, and soon there will be smartcoffee.

The plan though has brought about a lawsuit Techdirt reported. TreeHouse Foods, who state that “Such lock-out technology cannot be justified based on any purported consumer benefit, and Green Mountain itself has admitted that the lock-out technology is not essential for the new brewers’ function. Like its exclusionary agreements, this lock-out technology is intended to serve anticompetitive and unlawful ends.”

The move may just cause a few problems on its way to the shelves. We will be keeping track…

Update: It does state in official releases that this technology is there to ensure the machine can brew each variety to perfection, providing optimum temperatures and water flow for each pod and whilst this may be true – and makes sense too we should add as it should improve the taste and overall quality – but it does raise the question of what happens when the Keurig does not talk to a microchip. A flat-out rejection is the general consensus though this hasn’t been confirmed – but one only needs to look at the lawsuit to draw their own conclusion. They have also said that the measure is “critical for performance and safety reasons”

photo: ActuaLitté (flickr), used under Creative Commons