From coffee to Coke: New Keurig machine serves cold drinks
NEW YO R K Making a glass of Coke at home will soon be possible, if you don’t mind paying more than $300 for a machine that sits on your kitchen countertop. Plus an extra dollar or so per drink.
Keurig Green Mountain says it started selling a machine Tuesday that makes single servings of cold beverages including Coke, Sprite, Dr Pepper and flavoured seltzer waters.
The machine is similar in concept to Keurig’s brewers, which let people make cups of coffee and tea by inserting a pod into the machine and pressing a button.
Coca-Cola is betting bigon Keurig Kold, too; the world’s biggest soda maker owns a 16.8-per-cent stake in Keurig Green Mountain.
Still, it’s not yet clear who will buy the Keurig Kold, which is the size of a very large crockpot. Keurig says the suggested retail price for the machine is $369.99 US, but that prices could be as low as $299 US depending on promotions. Each pod will cost between $1.12 and $1.25 US and make an 8-ounce serving. That means it’s not really a way to save money, since people can buy two-litre bottles and sixpack cans of soda for less, on a perserving basis.
Instead, Keurig CEO Brian Kelley said Kold is a way for people to have a variety of drinks at their disposal, without having cans and bottles take up space in their homes. Among the other drinks the machine can make are “craft” sodas made by Keurig, and later this year, cocktail mixers.
“It’s a premium — it’s about choice and convenience,” Kelley said.
The idea of making sodas and other drinks at home isn’t new. SodaStream International also sells a carbonation machine that makes seltzer and other flavoured drinks. But its machine differs from the Keurig Kold.
With SodaStream, people fill a bottle with water and press down on a button to carbonate the liquid. They can add as much carbonation and flavouring as they want. A complaint among some users is that the carbonation comes from a CO2 canister, which needs to be replaced every several weeks or so, depending on how often it’s used.
The Keurig Kold, by contrast, is more controlled. People fill the machine’s water tank, then insert a pod to create a specific drink, such as Coke.
The pods have two chambers — one with the carbonation, and one with the syrup or flavour. The machine makes the drink in about 90 seconds or less, chilling the water in the process.
In addition to its high price, Phil Terpolilli at Wedbush Securities thinks a barrier to Kold’s popularity will be that soda is already so widely available.
“The consumer can already go into a fridge and crack open a Diet Coke,” Terpolilli said.
Still, Keurig thinks its Kold machine could eventually be bigger than its coffee brewers, which it says are in about 17 per cent of U.S. households.