Why is keurig so expensive

Please avoid disposable pods at all cost. We spend enough time in life racing from one thing to the next. The morning is sometimes the only time of the day we can control and tailor to our own needs. Brewing coffee manually and giving yourself a few minutes to do so has some powerful personal benefits:. Convenience aside, Keurig pods tend to be on the expensive side when you consider the actual value of the pods themselves. This is worth noting for a few reasons: The average American consumes just under mg of caffeine per day via coffee normal mugs.

When it comes to caffeine alone, K-Cups are more expensive than JavaPresse. Those K-Cups are filled with stale, low-grade commodity coffee and they make a sad, weak brew. Not all coffee beans are made equal. Some coffees are grown, processed, and roasted with a commodity mindset. The goal is volume and speed, not quality. However, other coffees are grown, processed, and roasted with a craftsman mindset. These beans are rich, balanced, and can be very diverse.

Fortunately, there is a great alternative. Keurig makes reusable pods that you can fill your own coffee in and use it to brew just like a normal Keurig pod. A 30 ounce can of the same coffee works out to be around the same cost, per ounce. That means you can have 3 times as much coffee using regular grounds than K-cups for the same price! So given the constraints of time and convenience, the Keurig does not do an altogether bad job of brewing coffee.

On the flip side, you have the freedom to try tons of different kinds of coffees and brands without having to worry about wasting coffee. There are sampler packs available which contain a variety of coffees. The first and most obvious disadvantage of a Keurig is the upfront cost. Compared to other drip coffee makers, Keurigs are very expensive.

When comparing to a French press, even more so! For the cost of a high end Keurig, you could probably buy a grinder and a small coffee machine. So to justify the cost, you have to weigh the convenience factor. Because Keurig is a proprietary product, they can demand a premium price. The Keurigs themselves cost the same as other high end coffee makers, but the cost of coffee pods will really add up. Aside from the upfront cost, the recurring cost of pods will also run high very quickly. It will still be cheaper than popping into Starbucks every morning, but it is more expensive than using coffee grounds, or making your own grounds from roasted beans.

According to this article in the New York Times , Keurig sells billions and billions of K-cups per year. Keurig says that pods actually use less water and fewer grounds than normal machines. That may sound like a good thing, but…. Finally, even if consumers are offered only recyclable pods, consumers will still have to actually recycle them, which is an entirely different story!

Let me share my experience brewing with Keurigs and brewing with an espresso machine. I used to own a Keurig, but right now, I use a small espresso machine and a french press for my coffee. Making coffee with the espresso machine is quite an involved process. I prefer cappuccinos, so I have to steam the milk, brew the espresso shot, and then combine both. It takes me about 4 to 5 minutes to make a nice cup of cappuccino — and the time will nearly double for every extra cup I have to make, since I have to foam the milk in every cup individually.

Is the Keurig coffee better than my cappuccino? Made by the company that makes Instant Pot multi-cookers , the Instant Pod can brew Keurig coffees in 8-, , and ounce sizes. The machine can also brew Nespressos in 2-, 4-, and 6-ounce sizes, which are roughly equivalent to the espresso drinks a basic Nespresso machine can make. The Instant Pod is user friendly to beginners, with a grid of one-touch buttons on the top of the machine specific to each brew size.

It was hard at first to tell that the buttons are touchscreen, which led us to press them hard several times to no effect. But if you press the button lightly, it will begin blinking to indicate the machine is warming up, and then brew your coffee.

The rectangular Instant Pod is approximately the same size as the K-Classic, though a little narrower and deeper. The Instant Pod has a one-year limited warranty that covers manufacturer defects, which is equivalent to the warranty on Keurig machines. Like the Labradoodle , Keurig is one of those things whose inventor regretted ever creating. Making good on their commitment to make all their pods recyclable by , Keurig now makes cups using 5 plastic, also known as polypropylene. This is an improvement over the previously used 7 plastic , or polystyrene, which comprises a cocktail of plastics that cannot be recycled.

To understand exactly what this means, we interviewed Steve Alexander, the president of The Association of Plastic Recyclers. Polyethylene terephthalate 1 , high-density polyethylene 2 , and polypropylene 5 are the most valuable plastics currently in the recycling stream and therefore the most likely to get recycled. But 1 and 2 plastics, which can be found in soda bottles and milk jugs, respectively, have historically larger markets and are more commonly recycled than 5 plastic. To recycle a recyclable K-Cup, you need to peel off the lid and remove the grounds and paper filter with your fingers.

The lid can be recycled with other aluminum products, but Alexander says any remaining foil from these lids acts as a contaminant to the plastics recycling process and could affect whether the pods are sorted correctly to be recycled. Most materials recovery facilities have filtering grates with holes so large that anything smaller than 2 inches across will slip through and end up in a landfill.

All this could change. But in our testing, the reusable filter still made watery, disappointing coffee that lost many of the tasting notes we noticed when brewing the same coffee using a drip or pour-over setup. At this point, you might as well use a real coffee maker, which will make better coffee anyway. While most Nespressos make concentrated, espresso-like drinks rather than a big cup of coffee, the cheapest Nespresso we recommend can make a drink called a lungo—an espresso made with double the amount of water—for people who dislike the strength of espresso.

And our upgrade pick can brew two sizes of Americanos, a diluted espresso drink more similar to coffee than an espresso. If you like both Keurig and Nespresso, the Instant Pod will make both. Unlike Keurig, Nespresso uses aluminum capsules, which are much more easily recycled than plastic. Nespresso also offers a recycling program that makes it easy to ship your pods free of charge to a Nespresso site that will take care of everything for you.

Nespresso also works with reusable capsules—there are many brands, but we tried Sealpods —but we found the resulting coffee tasted a little weak. Each process takes a little longer than Keurig, but the brew time for either is still under five minutes. In , Keurig released a new 2. This feature is frankly ridiculous. And even if you think you only want to make one cup at a time, a drip coffee maker is a better bet if you end up drinking multiple cups of coffee a day.

But the water reservoir system left too much room for human error, as it would brew a cup of coffee with however much water happened to be in the tank.

So when we forgot to check for leftover water before adding more to the reservoir, the K-Mini gushed ounce cups of coffee that spilled all over the counter and tasted even more like water than a normal Keurig coffee. In testing, we liked the K-Select the most because it offers a button for a stronger brew that makes coffee that tastes more like what coffee is supposed to taste like. Many reviewers complained that after a few weeks of use the K-Select uncontrollably spews cold water as soon as you press the power button.

So while we like the option of stronger coffee, we would prefer a machine that has a better track record of not being defective. The pricy Keurig K-Elite boasts all the features of the K-Select along with an iced coffee setting that brews concentrated hot coffee over ice that Keurig claims will taste cold but not diluted. If you want that, buy a drip coffee machine. Steve Alexander, president of the Association of Plastic Recyclers , phone interview, April 27, Tim Carman, How much better can coffee from a Keurig pod machine get?

Alex Colon, Keurig 2. Why you should trust us. How we picked and tested.