Green Mountain Coffee Roasters
Green Mountain's machines will only dispense K-Cups of premium coffee, tea, and cocoa. Buyers can then create their own fresh, hot beverages with an adjacent Keurig single-cup brewer.
This approach offers a perfect solution for commercial settings like a company break room or a hospital's waiting room, where the proprietor wants to offer access to coffee without giving it away.
These machines probably won't contribute materially to Green Mountain's financial performance -- not initially, anyway. The company moved 432 million K-Cup units in its latest quarter, so it's hard to see these single-unit dispensers moving the needle much. Instead, their benefit lies in the free advertising they offer.
Companies can stock up to a dozen different varieties of K-Cups in the machines, and they don't have to be just the namesake brands. Third-party brands including Caribou Coffee
The machines could also encourage users to purchase their own K-Cup systems for home use, once they see how easy it is to operate Keurig brewers. After all, now that even Wal-Mart
In short, this is just one more reason for the baristas at Starbucks
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