Two Midlands roasters embrace K-Cups, often derided by coffee purists. Here’s why

It doesn’t take long perusing the internet to find many stories articulating, from various angles, why most coffee enthusiasts think Keurig’s ubiquitous K-Cups and other similar pod-based brewing systems are bad.

The web is littered with explanations of why they produce bad-tasting coffee (among other factors, the coffee is often ground weeks, months or years before you pop it into your machine) and why they’re bad for the environment (unrecycled pods take hundreds of years to decompose in a landfill).

And while none of this has stalled their wider popularity — as of 2022, more than 25 million K-Cup brewers were installed in homes and offices in the U.S. — it does make people who emphasize the environment or starting their day with a really good cup of coffee think twice.

Which is why it’s so surprising that two Midlands roasters who put a huge emphasis on delivering fresh, attentively roasted coffee have embraced them as a way to meet people wherever they are on their coffee journey.

Irmo’s Loveland Coffee, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, is led by the exacting but welcoming influence of co-owner Beach Loveland. He was certified as a Roastmaster by the Specialty Coffee Association after a month of classes in San Francisco back in 2017.

His shop and roastery has offered K-Cups of its Soda City Sunrise medium roast (alongside a decaf Guatemala alternative) since they were approached about providing them to the boutique Hotel Trundle, which opened in 2018 in downtown Columbia.

More recently, Beulah Roasting Co., which opened in the small town of Batesburg-Leesville in October 2023, put into motion plans to install a cutting-edge machine that should allow it to fill its own K-Cups with freshly roasted coffee. David McCullough, a co-owner who handles business development for the new company, is also a mechanical engineer, and he said he helped the company that makes the machine perfect it.

The State talked to Loveland and Beulah about their approach to K-Cups and why they make them part of their offerings.

Keeping it fresh

For Beulah’s McCullough, K-Cups initially seemed like a conundrum the roastery might not be able to solve.

The new business, which operates a coffee shop at 532 Lexington St. in Batesburg-Leesville in addition to filling online orders, puts a premium on freshness. The co-owner explained that in addition to carefully monitoring the custody of their coffee to ensure that it is produced in the most sustainable, ethical way possible, they carefully align their batches with the orders they’ve received, to ensure their coffee is as fresh as it can be, typically reaching consumers within two weeks of being roasted.

When the small coffee startup looked toward breaking into the corporate-dominated K-Cup landscape, coming anywhere close to that standard of freshness seemed impossible.

Small roasters typically pull together 600-1,200 pounds of coffee at a time for K-Cup runs due to the high costs, many of them driven by shipping and waste, McCullough said.

“They’re tearing all your packaging up, they’re just throwing it away. It’s a waste. Then they have to get it, they have to process it, they have to put it in new packaging, and then they got to ship it to you. You’re gonna tear that packaging up, and you’re putting it in your final packaging,” he said. “There’s just a lot of waste in the process.”

It’s a herky-jerky process, with McCullough saying the companies’ steps unpacking and inspecting the coffee can last about a month, and when you add transit time to the equation, the coffee is likely to be up to two months old when the finished K-Cups arrive. The pods just get older from there, taking a long time to sell out because the roasters have to order in such large volume.

Which led Beulah to invest — both money and time helping to perfect it — in a new machine that will allow the roastery to freshly pack its own K-Cups on site. The device, which is set to arrive in the next couple weeks, should allow the company to produce up to 10,000 pods per eight-hour shift, so capacity won’t be an issue.

Given that his efforts working on the machine helped Beulah negotiate a lower price for it, McCullough said he couldn’t disclose how much it cost.

“We’ve flipped the script to where we are now getting the convenience with the quality and taking into account the sustainability factors of how we do that,” he said.

Quality and sustainability

Though Loveland’s K-Cup journey started about five years earlier, the roastery was confronted with many of the same challenges as Beulah when it set out to figure out if it could fulfill Hotel Trundle’s request for pods filled with local coffee.

The conversation started, the roaster said, with him explaining why he thought it couldn’t work.

“For me, it was the amount of waste that they create, the plastic and stuff like that, and then keeping it fresh,” Loveland said.

But he did some research, which led him to discover that the company he was already buying coffee bags from worked with smaller roasters like his to provide Keurig-compatible pods with cups and lids that are biodegradable.

Unlike Beulah, he wasn’t keen to invest in equipment to provide a product he didn’t think would become too popular among his clientele, so finding a company with sustainable packaging that would allow him to do K-Cups in small batches was the answer.

“This way I roast up my coffee fresh, send it over to the co-packers, and they grind it and package it and send it back to me,” he said. “Now I can do smaller runs. So it’s relatively fresh. It’s still good quality coffee.”

Loveland said he doesn’t sell many K-Cups to individual customers, though he does sell some. But he still has the Hotel Trundle account, and he’s added a couple local offices who stock his pods.

“As far as quality and taste of coffee, it’d be better than what you’d get just straight off the shelf at Sam’s Club,” he said, adding that there are limitations to how good K-Cup coffee can be, which is why Loveland doesn’t push them on customers much beyond keeping them on the shelf at the shop and available in their online store.

Loveland operates a roastery and coffee shop at 7475 Carlisle St. in Irmo and a drive-thru kiosk at 7001 St. Andrews Road.

“There’s only so much quality you’re going to be able to get when you’re putting it into a K-Cup,” the roaster continued. “You can’t control the temperature of water pushing through whatever machine they’re using and so on and so forth. But for the consumer that’s going to gravitate towards the K-Cup, I think that’s the trade off they’re used to.”

And, as he notes, the market for his K-Cups is curtailed by their price — $14.50 online for 12, compared to $27.98 for 100 Donut Shop Coffee pods via the Sam’s Club website.

But the surprising experience with K-Cups primed Loveland to be on the lookout for other ways to offer his coffee — which led him to add instant coffee packets two years ago.

He said the science of instant coffee has been pushed along by some intrepid companies to the point where there are options that actually produce a good cup.

“Instead of just batch-brewing instant coffee, they were doing pour-over style brewing methods and then flash-freezing and dehydrating coffee and making very high-end, specialty-grade instant coffee,” Loveland explained.

Meeting coffee drinkers where they are

Both Loveland and McCullough said offering K-Cups are part of trying to meet potential customers where they are in their coffee journeys — a jumping off point to perhaps push them toward better coffee in the future.

“We try to meet people where they are, educate where we can and then just be happy with where people land,” Loveland said. “That’s the best we can do.”

The steps Beulah has taken while it awaits its K-Cup machine embody this ethos.

The roastery offers unfilled, reusable pods, and they’ve posted instructional videos online on how to get the best cup of coffee when using them as well as the benefits to the environment that come with using a reusable pod instead of a disposable K-Cup.

The plan is to continue to offer the reusable pods and the instructional outreach once the K-Cup machine is up and running, with the hope being to lead pod drinkers to more sustainable brewing methods that also render better-tasting coffee.

McCullough recalled that when they asked their head roaster to produce videos showing people how to effectively use the reusable pods, he expressed a great deal of skepticism.

“He was like, ‘Man, come on.’ And I was like, ‘No, let’s do this,’” McCullough said. “‘This is the predominant way that the U.S. population is ingesting coffee. And we need to meet people where they are. If we want to give this great experience, we can’t pick and choose where we give it. We have to give it across the whole platform.’ So he agreed, he went through it.

“And after he got done, he said, ‘Hey, I’m not gonna lie to you. This is one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had.’”