I hate coffee pods for two main reasons: the taste and the single-serving plastic containers—the latter of which are an awful lot of waste just to make people’s lives marginally more convenient and their souls infinitely more miserable.
Fortunately, someone seems to have solved Keurig’s waste problem with something called CoffeeB, which claims to be the world’s first coffee capsule without the capsule.
Created by Swiss company Delica, CoffeeB aims to completely cut the 100,000-plus tons of waste generated by more than 63 billion coffee pods consumed worldwide every year, according to a 2021 market research study by Euromonitor. That year, the Nespressos and Keurigs of the world grew 18% and made almost $13.5 billion. A whopping 41% of consumers in the U.S. owned a coffee pod machine in 2018.No wonder manufacturers are projected to sell $29 billion in pods by 2025.
This trend is not exclusive to America’s easy-to-consume, single-serving culture. In Spain, which is as coffee-obsessed as Italy, 7 out of 10 Spaniards use coffee pods,which is terrible, really. Shame on my fellow lazy countrymen.While easy enough to brew, coffee pods are devastating for the environment—so much so that even the inventor of the Keurig K-Cup regrets creating the system. Despite claims that pods can be sustainable with new biodegradable plastics and recyclable packaging, the fact is that most capsules end up in the landfill, where they experience a 500-year life as toxic trash before they disintegrate.
Roll the ball
So that’s where CoffeeB comes in. “The company started developing a completely waste-free system five years ago,” Frank Wilde, Head of CoffeeB, told me via email.
The goal, he said, was not only to get rid of the capsule waste but to fully protect the aroma and taste of the coffee. He claimed that while other manufacturers are trying to make their pods degradable but, so far, there has been a trade off between aroma protection and degradability. “The better the degradability of the capsule, the worse the protection of the aroma. With CoffeeB that’s no longer the case,” he assured me.
The coffee itself comes from Peru, and the balls are produced in Birsfelden, Switzerland.
A matter of taste
CoffeeB claims that the company has used an external independent institute to perform taste-test comparisons against a range of single-serve systems. It didn’t disclose the name of this institute or the methodology, but it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, people will taste it for themselves and see how it compares to current pods and other extraction methods.
Update: This post has been updated with a correction on the coffee balls’ price and a clarification about the degradability of the competing capsules. The quotes in the article were made by Frank Wilde, Head of CoffeeB.
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the final deadline, June 7.
Sign up for Brands That Matter notifications here.