Keurig is a beverage brewing system for home and commercial use. The American company Keurig Dr Pepper manufactures the machines. The main Keurig products are K-Cup pods, which are single-serve coffee containers; other beverage pods; and the proprietary machines that use these pods to make beverages.
Keurig beverage varieties include hot and cold coffees, teas, cocoas, dairy-based beverages, lemonades, cider, and fruit-based drinks. Keurig has over 400 varieties and over 60 brands of coffee and other beverages through its own and partnership-licensed brands. In addition to K-Cup pods, it includes Vue, K-Carafe, and K-Mug pods.
The original single-serve brewer and coffee-pod manufacturing company, Keurig, Inc., was founded in Massachusetts in 1992. It launched its first brewers and K-Cup pods in 1998, targeting the office market. As the single-cup brewing system gained popularity, brewers for home use were added in 2004. In 2006, the publicly traded Vermont-based specialty coffee company Green Mountain Coffee Roasters acquired Keurig, sparking rapid growth for both companies. In 2012, Keurig's main patent on its K-Cup pods expired, leading to new product launches, including brewer models that only accept pods from Keurig brands.
From 2006 to 2014, Keurig, Inc. was a wholly owned subsidiary of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. When Green Mountain Coffee Roasters changed its name to Keurig Green Mountain in March 2014, Keurig ceased to be a separate business unit and subsidiary and instead became Keurig Green Mountain's main brand. In 2016, Keurig Green Mountain was acquired by an investor group led by private-equity firm JAB Holding Company for nearly $14 billion. In July 2018, Keurig Green Mountain merged with Dr Pepper Snapple Group in a deal worth $18.7 billion, creating Keurig Dr Pepper, a publicly traded conglomerate which is the third largest beverage company in North America.
History
Inception and development
Keurig founders John Sylvan and Peter Dragone had been college roommates at Colby College in Maine in the late 1970s. In the early 1990s, Sylvan, a tinkerer, had quit his tech job in Massachusetts and wanted to solve the commonplace problem of office coffee – a full pot of brewed coffee that sits and grows bitter, dense, and stale – by creating a single-serving pod of coffee grounds and a machine that would brew it. Living in Greater Boston, he went through extensive trial and error trying to create a pod and a brewing machine. By 1992, to help create a business plan, he brought in Dragone, then working as director of finance for Chiquita, as a partner. They founded the company in 1992, calling it Keurig; Sylvan later said that the name came from his having "looked up the word excellence in Dutch".
The prototype brewing machines were also a work in progress and unreliable, and the company needed funds for development. That year, they approached what was then Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, and the specialty coffee company first invested in Keurig at that time. Keurig needed sizeable venture capital; and after pitching to numerous potential investors, the three partners finally obtained $50,000 from Minneapolis-based investor Food Fund in 1994, and later the Cambridge-based fund MDT Advisers contributed $1,000,000. In 1995, Larry Kernan, a principal at MDT Advisers, became Chairman of Keurig, a position he retained through 2002. Sylvan did not work well with the new investors, and in 1997, he was forced out, selling his stake in the company for $50,000. Dragone left a few months later but decided to retain his stake.