I found this tidbit interesting in Starbucks’ plan to re-gain market share:
Late in the two-hour meeting, Schultz revealed that Starbucks has bought The Coffee Equipment Co. of Ballard, for an undisclosed sum. Its product, the Clover, custom-makes individual cups of coffee from fresh-ground beans, using a combination of French press and vacuum techniques.
Schultz said stores in New York are charging $7 a cup for Clover coffee. He wouldn’t say what Starbucks may charge but admitted he was “very encouraged” by the price Clover coffee can fetch. The cost of a cup of Clover coffee may reflect the cost of the coffee from which it’s made.
I think it’s great that you can brew one cup of coffee at a time instead of a pot, but for $7 you might as well ask for an entire pot. What’s so great about this Clover anyway? From their website:
Aren’t your beans worth it?
Everyone from the grower to the roaster has worked hard to do right by these beans. Now it’s your turn to make them shine. Clover 1s™ gives you the power to brew each cup to order according to each coffee’s unique characteristics, in a fraction of the time of other single-cup brewing methods. Bring out the subtle nuances of all of your coffees through complete, independent control of all of the important brew parameters: grind size, dose, water temperature, and contact time.Would you let a latte sit for 20 minutes?
Didn’t think so. So why serve anything less than fresh-brewed coffee? With the Clover, every cup is a hand-crafted, fresh cup. Your customers can now choose any beans on your coffee menu, watch and smell their own coffee brew, discuss the cup with their barista, and enjoy the experience like never before.It’s 7:05 AM. Do you know what your customers are drinking?
Know with CloverNet™, a service that gives you web access to your Clovers. Find out what’s brewing on each of your Clovers right now, and visualize business trends through real-time charting. CloverNet also makes it easy to update brew parameters for all of your coffees, and to keep your Clovers in peak operation through system monitoring. Ask your roaster’s sales representative about adding CloverNet to your new and existing Clovers. (No rep? Then contact us.) It’s your business; you should know.
Okay that last part is kinda creepy although can your coffee choice say that much about you? It’s hardly private information. But still, I’m old school and I say it’s creepy.
The coffee industry is starting to look more and more like the wine industry. Like grapes in wine, I suppose coffee beans produce some subtle differences in taste. But does a coffee pot really need to cost the same as a nice bottle of red? Will the Frappachino be the next Pinot Grigio?
Spycoffee? So expensive, they have to know the details? Maybe it’s supposed to be ‘quality control,’ but it sounds more like an attempt to justify the cost. Why not just use the cafe’s hotspot for covert surveilance?
lol yeah, creepy. I don’t think they’re going to make a database and one day kill off all the ‘undesirables’ who have ‘inferior’ taste, but at the same time I don’t want them to have the ABILITY to. 🙂
I wonder if the lines will be any longer waiting for a new cup of coffee to brew for each person?
Does coffee actually have time to sit around at Starbucks?
$7.00 is crazy and creepy!
~Lisa
this is the most retarded crap i have ever read. brew your own.
There’s going to be a backlash for “old school” coffee, like Maxwell House and Nescafe.
If you where to put the brain of a person that paid $7 for a cup of coffee into a “peanut”…….shake it…..it would sound like a “BB” on a Battleship……….but that same person will tell you that they can stretch a gnats a!! over a 6″ fence post…..go figure!
If you’ve never tried a Clover, you owe it to yourself. I’m actually saddened that the jolly green (coffee) giant bought the company, because it simply makes the best brewed coffee very quickly. In Portland, OR there are several caffes with the machines, and coffee brewed this way fetches maybe a buck more per cup (maybe two bucks for an extraordinarily rare coffee like Esmerelda or Jamaica Blue). Perfectly reasonable for a fresh brewed cup in 30 seconds. The issue with other single brew methods for simple black coffee – like a small press pot or a single cup cone filter – is that they take 3-4 minutes depending on the roast of the coffee and the density of the bean. The clover takes only marginally longer than pumping a cup of coffee from an air pot. The $7 cup is nuts, and crazier still is the notion of tracking your customers with a wired version of a coffee machine. Why not also install ethernet connections on espresso machines, so that cafe owners can tell just how many doubles or ristretto triples their selling? Seems like overkill – but the green monster from Seattle has done sillier things (such as market research in the fashion industry to predict the hot color for upcoming seasons, which they turn around and use to craft the right colored iced drinks).
Don’t knock the clover if you haven’t tried it. The cost for the equipment is marginal when you compare it to a La Marzocco.
I work for starbucks (barista) and I never knew shit about any of these crazy changes in policy and I was shocked to learn about everything thats going on from the company – obsessive regulars about all of this. I think its a great idea to brew by the cup (I actully was thinking of that this morning, unaware of the recent decision!) and an even better business strategy to monitor the types of coffee being brewed. These figures can improve sales by conjuring up the public’s coffee habits, making these figures predictable, and wholesale brewing (in the larger pots) the most popular coffees at the appropriate times.
Yes, I do in some ways find it creepy, and unsettling, this trend of people – monitoring that companies are utilizing to improve sales and shit like that.
It is not just the Clover that makes the coffee good, but top quality beans, roasting, and a great barista to program the temperature and brew time, and grind to match the current selection of beans. The combination can make a worthy $7 cup of coffee, but Starbucks will only have the Clover. If you put bad beans in a Clover, or don’t carefully adjust the temperatures, you will still have the usual mediocre coffee that has been defined by Starbucks.
I am in the industry and saw the Clover at the SCA conference in LA a few years back. The coffee is unlike anything you have tried – the reason Starbucks bought the company is because the Clover make unbelievable coffee and since so many people are already paying $7 for a cappuccino soon $7 for a coffee will become the norm!
We are for some reason happy to pay $7 for a hot cup of milk with a shot of espresso when at the local grocery store we would snap at $7 for 4L of milk. Yes Starbucks provided us an experience and this latest acquisition will no doubt take coffee to another level.
As a coffee critic I for one would be happy to pay $7 for a coffee experience instead of $7 for a milk experience.
Thanks for the insider info. You must make more money than I do though. I can’t imagine spending that much for even the greatest coffee. Or the greatest beer for that matter.
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i was an advocate of Starbucks or any coffee house that could make a great cappuccino or latte for me – i realized i love espresso over coffee but it wasn’t until i had a Nespresso from my friends house and decided single cup is the ONLY way. i did some real coffee “google-ing” and beans go stale in less then a day. a $5000 machine can’t even preserve your beans from going stale so why wouldn’t we embrace single cup – and who cares if it’s counted. aren’t we all about preservation and conservation these days? haste makes waste.
i don’t want to see Starbucks decline or suffer from GROSS OUT fakes like Dunkin D’s and McD’s doing “espresso” – seriously???? So, i’d love a single cup from Starbucks but guys there is nothing better then a Nespresso. coffee, espresso – it pulls both and it’s amazing.
runs on their own sexy, modern capsules only which should be every coffee “junky’s” pleasure to know that it’s a perfect espresso every time. and, cost? i can do a double shot latte for about a buck and there’s nothing cheap about Nespresso – in fact, it’s luxury at its best but, forget what you think you know about a single brew cup until you try this. Bloomies and Williams Sonoma sell and serve with any asking for a “taste”. peace to the coffee lovers.
a few things:
1) Starbucks does not utilize the clover’s feature of tracking what is being brewed via clovernet. of course starbucks tracks what is sold through their clovers through other means, but it is not publically posted. i hope that makes people feel less sketched out.
2) Starbucks does not sell the clover coffee for seven dollars. when howard schultz found the clover at a small coffee shop in nyc, that was how much it was sold for there because the cafe couldn’t afford such an expensive machine. some of the coffees through the clover at starbucks are only 20 cents more expensive when served hot, and some of the iced coffees brewed through the clover are less expensive than the traditional stuff. this is because the traditional iced coffee is marketed to a crowd that is prone to add cream and sugar- so the traditional iced coffee price already includes sugar syrup. the clover iced coffee market tends to drink it black, so the classic sugar syrup is not included- therefore making it less money and affordable.
3) a cup of coffee, especially the single origin blends, are amazing through the clover. no one should hate on it until they try it.
I agree with the above comment, you shouldn’t say you hate anything ’til you’ve tried as you don’t actually know what it is you supposedly hate!