But I am not a coffee snob. Well, sort of not. When Keurig was still just a leased restaurant machine, they had no home version for their single-cup pods, I bought one from a restaurant sale. It was pretty expensive then but today you can get a home machine for around $150. So I was being a little coffee snobbish avant-garde in buying the machine in the first place but now I am the anti-snob, because single cup machines are gauche and a single cup brew from a pod is what I drink in the morning.
I'm not alone. While coffee revenue is going up, the purists who brew are plummeting. If U.S. coffee sales reach $11.7 billion this year, that will be up 11.4% from 2012 but single-cup coffee sales will have had a whopping 213% boost since just 2011. Roasted coffee, meanwhile, is projected to fall 2.7% during the same period. And actual coffee bean sales are falling. A single cup has no waste whereas lots of people brewed and threw out old pots of coffee they never drank.
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But the snobs may not be losing ground, they are just being replaced by other snobs. Well-off young adults, 18 to 34 year-olds earning over $75,000 per year, drink single-cups 64% of the time compared with just 51% for those earning less than $75,000.
What single-cup brewers offer is consistency. While a barista may offer moments of brilliance, there are just as many disappointments.
Sales of single-serve coffee have tripled since 2011 By Quentin Fottrell, MarketWatch
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