COFFEE PODS PILING UP IN LANDFILLS

We never tire of complaining about single serve coffee pods that are claimed to be "recyclable" but are just a waste of aluminum and plastic, and, according to a blog at Treehugger,  are piling up in landfills across America. That is the environmental cost, but Smart Planet notes that there is a real financial cost too.   As I mentioned in a previous blog, the price of convenience of the pod coffee is as much as fifty dollars a pound.

The New York Times did the math:  For example, the Nespresso Arpeggio costs $5.70 for 10 espresso capsules, while the Folgers Black Silk blend for a K-Cup brewed-coffee machine is $10.69 for 12 pods. But that Nespresso capsule contains 5 grams of coffee, so it costs about $51 a pound. And the Folgers, with 8 grams per capsule, works out to more than $50 a pound. That’s even more expensive than all but the priciest coffees sold by artisanal roasters, the stuff of coffee snobs.

Cheap coffee can be found for about eight bucks a pound.  Our Café Pinon, a very special gourmet fusion coffee is about $21 a pound, the Official SASS coffee: Cowboy Action Coffee, a special proprietary blend is about $25 a pound and our Paniola 100% Kona, the finest coffee in the world, is about $32 a pound.  Paying $50 a pound for Folgers is just ridiculous. But apparently people under 40 don't notice because they think about coffee pricing differently than their parents; from Oliver Strand's article in the Times:  “Americans under the age of 40 are thinking about coffee pricing in cups,” said Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. “If you asked my mother how much coffee cost, she would have told you that the red can was $5.25 a pound and the blue can was $4.25. If you ask people in their 20s and 30s, they’ll say coffee is $1.75 to $3.75 a cup.”

Next to Tasmanian ice cubes, coffee pods are about the most wasteful product I can think of, costing many times as much to make lousy coffee. Yet their sales are growing like mad, almost doubling in the last year to 7% of all the coffee made in America.

Go figure.

Do you want FREE coffee?  The very first cowpoke who saunters up to the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company’s Cowboy Coffee Saloon at Buffalo Stampede at SASS Founders Ranch in Edgewood, NM, Tuesday, April 17 through Sunday, April 22, and asks for it will get a free, that’s FREE bag of CAFÉ PINON de Nuevo Mexico…our newest fusion coffee made with a proprietary blend of central American coffees and real New Mexico pinon nuts!

The purpose of this blog is to unite Kona coffee lovers and perhaps learn a little about coffee and all the benefits of coffee at the same time.  Join up, become a member, comment and have fun!  You can find the Kona Coffee Fiends group on Facebook and we’d appreciate it if Facebook users would “LIKE” the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company page at www.facebook.com/pages/Kona-Cowboy-Coffee-Company/222070817858553.  Just copy and paste to your browser.  You can also find us on Twitter at twitter.com/jackshuster.  And on the web at www.KonaCowboyCoffee.com to order your gourmet coffee and coffee products.

You know you’re a coffee fiend when you walk twenty miles on your treadmill before you realize it's not plugged in. So enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!