Office coffee traditionally meant the one flavor brewed the way whoever was making the coffee liked it. If you didn’t like the flavor or how it was brewed, you had to either add enough creamer and sugar to mask the taste or suffer through it. And the coffee sat in the carafe until the carafe was empty which resulted in burnt, stale, flavorless “coffee,” or commonly referred as “office sludge.”
Enter Keurig® Coffee Brewers
John Sylvan wanted to solve this office coffee problem by creating a single-serve coffee package and a machine that could brew coffee using it. And the Keurig® brewer was born! The Keurig® brewer and plastic K-cups® solved the office coffee problem by brewing a fresh, individual cup of coffee for each user each time it was used. Employees could select their favorite coffee roast and freshly brew it to their individual strength profile. However, as Keurig® gained popularity both in offices and in homes, Sylvan and others recognized a developing coffee brewing issue: the plastic K-cup® was not recyclable or biodegradable.
In 2014, Keurig sold 9 billion K-Cups® and every single one entered our waste stream, in landfills or waterways. That’s enough K-Cups® to circle the globe 10.5 times when the cups are placed end-to-end. Similar to plastic 5-gallon water jugs, K-Cups® take hundreds of years to break down.
An Eco-Friendly Office Coffee Alternative
Rather than go back to stale, burnt coffee, many environmentally conscious offices are turning to pod coffee brewing. Coffee pods are small, round, almost flat discs of ground coffee wrapped in biodegradable filter paper. Like Keurig® coffee brewers, pod coffee brewers allow users to brew their favorite roast to their personal strength profile in under a minute. But unlike Keurig® K-Cups®, coffee pods are 100% biodegradable.
In addition to eliminating the plastic trash associated with single-cup brewing, coffee pods also provide a better tasting cup of coffee. Coffee pods offer better coffee extraction because they have more surface area for the water to make contact with the coffee grounds, compared to the small K-Cup®. This also allows for a stronger, bolder aroma while the coffee is brewing because the aroma is not sealed in the plastic K-Cup®. Many coffee baristas attribute better contact time and a stronger aroma to a better tasting cup of coffee.
In addition to being an environmentally sustainable office coffee alternative, pod coffee brewing is an economical alternative to Keurig® brewers. Pod brewing is 24% less expensive per cup than Keurig® brewing. On average, a single cup of coffee brewed using a Keurig® costs about $0.66 while a single cup of coffee brewed using a pod brewer costs about $0.50. The average office employee drinks about 3 cups of coffee a day so that’s a savings of $0.48 cents per employee per day. So a 100-person office with could save up to $12,000 over the course of a year by switching to a pod brewer!
And with coffee pods, office managers do not need to worry about pods leaving the office for home brewers like they do with Keurig® K-Cups®.
Quench Offers Pod Brewers
So what are you waiting for? Pod brewing is more environmentally sustainable, brews a better tasting cup of coffee and costs less per cup than a Keurig® brewed cup. And lucky for you, Quench, who 40,000 customers across the U.S. – including over half of the Fortune 500 – trust for their office drinking water, also offers pod coffee brewers. Learn more about our Office Coffee Service and pod brewers by filling out the form above or calling a Quench Coffee Expert at 877-336-5848.
