Monday Morning Coffee News

Happy Monday! Last week in coffee: Another familiar name in coffee raises its prices, iced coffee kegs give office workers a much deserved treat, Starbucks wants to get to you through your phone, and could coffee be good for your teeth?

– Last week JM Smucker, the company selling Dunkin’ Donuts and Folgers, announced a 9% increase in its packaged bags of coffee sold through grocery and retail stores. This week Kraft announced they too will be raising the prices on some of their coffee products, namely Maxwell House and Yuban bags of ground coffee, by 10%. The company’s Gevalia and Tassimo brands are not included in this increase and neither are thier single serve and instant coffee offerings. – This announcement makes the second of its kind in the past two weeks and I’m sure more are on the horizon. If prices continue to rise, I have a back-up plan: buy cheap coffee and just get a good flavored creamer (I’m partial to International Delight flavors), but I hope it won’t come to that.

Kraft Raises Maxwell House, Yuban Coffee Brands Prices About 10% (online.wsj.com)
Kraft Raises Prices on Maxwell House, Yuban U.S. Coffee Products (bloomberg.com)
Breakfast Is Getting More Expensive (finance.yahoo.com)

– Joyride Coffee, a new York based company, is enjoying a boom in business as their cold brew coffee kegs and “kegerators” are keeping office workers very happy by supplying delicious iced coffee on tap. The offices for Gawker, Gilt, Buzzfeed, Fab, and Twitter all use one of these babies much to the delight of their employees. – I think this is a fabulous idea and I’m not at all surprised it’s such a success. They must have some fantastic coffee too as the client list from their website is quite impressive.

Joyride Coffee (joyridecoffeedistributors.com)
Office Iced Coffee Keg: The Best Thing to Happen at Work, Ever? (yahoo.com)
Forget Beer — Iced Coffee Kegs Are The Hottest New Trend (nypost.com)

– Starbucks has teamed up with Duracell Powermat to bring wireless charging to their stores. Tables and counters will have the charging pads built into them and customers will simply need to place their devices in the right spot for them be charged. For Starbucks, the advantage of this move is clear: customers popping in when they realize their phone needs charging and buying a drink while they wait for it to charge. Powermat benefits as well – it pushes consumers to buy devices compatible with their technology and gives the company an advantage over competitors. – This is exactly something I would expect from Starbucks, whose shops have always been very tech and customer friendly, and sounds like a good move all around.

Starbucks Brews Wireless Cell Phone Charging (usatoday.com)
Starbucks To Offer Wireless Recharging (money.cnn.com)
Starbucks Now Lets You Sip Coffee AND Wirelessly Charge Your Phone (techtimes.com)

– A new study has come out looking at the antibacterial properties of coffee when it comes to your teeth. Researchers conducting the study took teeth, lost naturally from healthy children, sectioned them and covered them in nail varnish, leaving a small patch free. Saliva collected from healthy adults was then added to the teeth. The teeth were then treated with water (negative control), coffee, or antibiotic (positive control). The results showed coffee to have positive antibacterial properties, protecting the teeth to some extent by causing bacterial lysis. The results are encouraging and more research along this line may lead to isolating the responsible chemical components for use in tooth care products. – While the results of this study are interesting, I think all the headlines proclaiming coffee good for your teeth should be taken with a grain of salt and readers need to keep in mind what any long-term coffee drinker knows – coffee stains teeth with prolonged use and can seriously harm the enamel, so it’s probably not something one wants to look to for dental health in and of itself.