SINGLE SERVE
SMILE BEVERAGE WERKS
Something to SMILE about
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SMILE BEVERAGE WERKS HAS DEVELOPED A HIGH-QUALITY COMPOSTABLE COFFEE CAPSULE AND IS SHARING ITS TURNKEY SUSTAINABLE SINGLE-SERVE SOLUTION WITH THE AMERICAN COFFEE INDUSTRY.
he K-Cup is far and away the most popular single serve coffee capsule in the United States, with approximately one in four homes owning a Keurig capsule brewer. In 2020 alone, market analyst Information Resources estimated that three million new households became users of the Keurig coffee system, bringing the total number of households to 33 million. Despite the success of Keurig, its founder and K-Cup inventor John Sylvan told The Atlantic in 2015 that he “feels bad sometimes” for ever creating it due to the waste that K-Cups and single serve coffee generates. Smile Beverage Werks has set out to change that. “Single-use plastic pods are the number three cause of single-use plastic pollution in North America. Fifteen billion are made per year, and less than 1 per cent get recycled, which means more than 14 billion are getting wasted every year,” Smile Beverage Werks Co-founder Michael Sands tells Global Coffee Report. Discovering a plant-based compostable material that had been applied to Nespresso systems in Europe, Sands and co-founder Frankie Schuster acquired the rights to the technology for use in the Americas and began developing it to work with Keurig machines. “It wasn’t as easy as taking what they had created in Europe and launching it in the US. Keurig machines brew coffee in a very different way to Nespresso,” Sands explains. “For instance, K-Cups are multi-layered with a filter inside, so it took about two years of research and development to apply the technology in a new format and achieve the necessary certifications.” Smile Beverage Werks’ capsules are certified as commercially compostable by the Biodegradable Products Institute in the US and DinCertco in Europe and as a bio-based product by the United States Department of Agriculture. Furthermore, the company is climate neutral certified through
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G C R | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2021
Climate Partners and sources Rainforest Alliance certified coffee. Sands says this is all to reassure its customers and end consumers that Smile’s products are the best possible for the environment. “The third wave is growing stronger and people are getting excited about coffee, especially among Millennials and Generation Z. But if you know about good coffee, you also probably know about the impact pods have on the environment,” he says. “Take away that issue and it opens up a whole super-premium segment of the market and, at the same time, brews a better cup of coffee.” What separate Smile from other commercially compostable pods, according to Sands, is that they are made of plant-based material rather than petroleum-based plastic. This means they breakdown earlier when commercially composted and, if they end up in landfill, will biodegrade faster than traditional compostable capsules, without leaking harmful chemicals into the soil or water.
