4 lessons hidden in a K-cup by Tishma Technologies

We are sure you have heard about the most popular single-serve coffee container for coffee brewing – the famous, yet controversial K-Cup! Today,  many homes and offices have K-Cup machines for individual serving size and flavors, which is why entering this competitive market might seem so appealing. K-Cups brought revolution. The coffee pods’ share of total coffee sales in 2000 was almost negligible, but, with the launch of K-Cups, this market was taken by storm, commanding a strong 34% share of total coffee sales in 2014.

When it comes to packaging, K-Cups are quite an inspiring topic. There are many useful lessons we can learn just observing K-Cups, their development and principles they apply. So, what are the most important lessons we can extract?

K-cup: How it works? by Tishma Technologies

1.        Be creative - Package as an innovation

Innovative packaging can help a product penetrate new markets and it can also change the way consumers perceive a product. Just like stick pack revolutionized the way we use sugar (learn more here), Keurigs coffee machines and K-cups introduced an entire new way of brewing coffee, forming a new market.

Lesson? Be creative and persistent with your ideas! At first, the creators of K-cups were making the pods by hand. The prototype brewing machines were a work in progress and unreliable, and the company needed funds for development. After numerous pitches to potential investors, they finally got $50,000 from Minneapolis-based investor Food Fund in 1994, and later the Cambridge-based fund MDT Advisers contributed $1,000,000.

2.     Be economic - Space saving

K-cups are transported and stored in carton boxes, packed in a certain manner that saves space. Good K-Cup packaging system can invert every-other cup, so the cups interleave and minimize space usage in the box, so that means more K-cups can fit into one carton. This is exactly how you should treat your floor space when you are purchasing any type of industrial line. No matter how big your space is, why cluttering it with huge machines and massive pieces of equipment? Look for a manufacturer that can cater to your specific needs and create a custom solution with respect to your floor space.

3.       Be eco-friendly - Recycling

Unfortunately, K-cups fail when it comes to recycling. The K-cup system has a lot of quite demanding technical requirements: being able to withstand a certain amount of temperature, to have a certain kind of rigidity, to provide the right kind of moisture barriers and oxygen barriers etc. So, recycling isn't the easiest challenge. Keurig has been publicly criticized by environmental activists and journalists for the billions of non-recyclable and non-biodegradable K-Cups, which end up in landfills. Prevent this from happening to you! Being eco-friendly and responsible towards the environment is the one of the top requirements for companies in the 21st century, so make sure your packaging is recyclable or biodegradable.

 

Be eco friendly by Tishma Technologies

4.       Stick with the original - Authenticity

Only licensed and standardized K-cups are compatible with Keurig’s coffee machines. There are a large number of unlicensed coffee pods  available in the market, but even though they are cheaper, their use is not recommended because they can cause damage to your coffee machine. Use of strictly licensed K-cups may seem costly in the short term, but in the long term it saves money, because it makes your coffee machine last longer. Same goes for acquiring printer cartridges, mobile phone chargers or spare parts for an industrial machine – always buy from a reliable manufacturer. This is the only way to be sure that materials or add-ons you bought are fully compatible with the system you already have.

So what is our final advice, after going through these lessons? If you want to get your share of profit in coffee brewing market, your next step is finding the right packaging system that will allow you to quickly pack and ship your K-Cups to the final users.

The most important requirement for K-Cup packaging machines is being able to handle the cups coming in, top –up, at a very high rate of speed (sometimes up to 900 cups per minute) and inverting every-other cup in order to save space.

Start by checking out Tishma Technologies TI 100 vertical Cartoner. TI 100 is a High-Speed small center vertical system with a patented computer scale interface or volumetric cup fillers for high speed cartoning of K-Cups. Our 100 Series Cartoners feature user-friendly PLC’s combined with mechanical, state-of-the-art simplicity, and besides K-Cups, they are also very convenient for Fruit Cups and Yogurt packaging.

From Forklifts to Robots by Tishma Technologies

Pallets and pallet handling, invented in the 20th Century, became one of the most significant logistics tools. Over the past century pallets continued to develop, thus enabling the evolution of modern logistics. Use of pallets brought important efficiency improvements in the handling and transport of unit loads. During World War 2, some additional improvements were added to pallet design and management.

Army logistics in WW2 by Tishma Technologies 

The first to take steps in developing new warehouse handling and storage methods was The Office of The Quartermaster General, Field Operations Branch of the Storage Division. They were faced with the big pressure and big responsibility: their new methods had to give results quickly. At the time, one manufacturer was able to deliver an amount of a fork trucks with a load capacity of 2000 lb.  As a result, the system was predicated on this particular truck, and the pallet of the Quartermaster Corps was designed to fit that truck load capacity. A standard Quartermaster pallet is 32 in. long and 40 in. wide.  A million or more of these were procured and placed in service during the following year.

As the time passed, manufacturers of fork trucks increased their production and the Quartermaster General procured the larger trucks for all services, making the use of larger pallets more common.

The Navy started its materials handling program in 1942.  By then, the manufacturers of fork trucks were in quantity production, so the Navy ordered more of the larger trucks with load capacity up to 15,000 lb.  This is why the pallets made for inter-depot and overseas shipment are bigger: they are standardized on the 48 x 48 in. for inter-depot and overseas shipment, and 42 x 66 in. pallet for the intra-depot movements

According to some experts’ predictions, somewhere between one million and three million pallets will be disposed of by the government once they are no longer needed by the Army. The largest volume will be in the 32 x 40 in., 48 x 48 in. and the 42 x 66 in. sizes. Some of the 42 x 66 in. pallets will be picked up by stevedoring companies for use in marine terminals, and other pallet sizes will be used by manufacturers who are now learning the value of this shipment.

Before the Army ordered so many pallets, industry had been reconsidering building pallets of light, cheap construction, so called “single shippers,” intended to carry one load and then be discarded as scrap lumber, but since a large surplus of pallets is expected, this cheap “one use” type of pallet will not be developed.  Instead, the industry is probably going to absorb the surplus pallets.

 

Palletizing than and now by Tishma Technologies

Many companies utilize pallets for shipping and stacking of their products and since manually placing boxes on pallets can be time consuming and expensive these companies turn to automatic palletizing systems. If you still haven’t, consider investing in a good, automated palletizing system built to meet your needs, check out robotic Palletsizers by Tishma Technologies.

Who invented a cardboard box?

Have you ever imagined how the world would look like if the cardboard box was never invented? How would you pack for moving to a new place? How would Amazon deliver their goods to you? This four angled, square shaped invention spontaneously became a symbol of transport, protection, efficiency and change. But who is to be credited for this innovation, and when did it all start?

Corrugated (also called pleated) paper was at first used as a liner for tall hats, and it was patented in England in 1856. Fifteen years later, on the 20^th of December, 1871, first corrugated boxboard was patented and used as material for shipping containers. Credits for inventing a single-sided corrugated board are given to Albert Jones from New York City and three years later, Oliver Long improved Jones's design by adding liner sheets on both sides of corrugated board creating a design that we know today.

In 1874, G. Smyth built the first machine for producing bigger amounts of corrugated board, but it took 15 years for people to start using this new material to create a case packaging.

In 1890, a Brooklyn printer and paper-bag maker, Robert Gair invented the pre-cut cardboard box. He came to this invention by accident. One day, while he was printing an order of seed bags, a metal ruler which is used to crease bags changed position and cut them. Gair then discovered that by cutting and creasing at the same time he could make prefabricated paperboard boxes! This idea was applied to corrugated boxboard when the material became available around the turn of the twentieth century.

In 1915 John Van Wormer of Toledo, Ohio, took the credits for inventing first "paper bottle," - folded blank box for holding milk he called "Pure-Pak." The fact that milk carton could be folded, glued, filled with milk, and sealed at a dairy farm was considered a great innovation at the time. Increased demand for lightweight flaked cereals lead to the rise in the use of cardboard boxes and first company to use cardboard boxes as cereal cartons was the Kellogg Company.

During all this time, Japan was way ahead of Europe and USA when it comes to the use of cardboard boxes. Since 1840, Japanese silk manufacturers have been using these boxes for transporting the Bombyx mori moth and its eggs from Japan to Europe.

Today, cardboard cases became an immediate association for shipping and stacking of various goods. Close to 100 billion boxes are produced each year in the U.S. That is a lot of boxes and just imagine all the time and money that can be saved if each of those boxes was filled by efficient and economic packaging line! For more on Tishma Technologies case packaging systems, please click here.