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.