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Single-cup coffee machines seem like an economical alternative to Starbucks until you realise how wallet-crippling the pods are. In the same way that printer companies make their money from ink cartridges, coffee machine companies such as Tassimo and Nespresso focus on the coffee capsules.

One US-based brand, Keurig, is not too happy with the fact that entrepreneurial third parties have developed pod refills that cost less than a quarter of the price of the branded pods. Reusable pods -- which can be filled with coffee grounds, used, and cleaned again for refill -- have proved to be particularly popular.


TreeHouse Foods is suing Keurig's parent company Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, accusing it of "anticompetitive acts to unlawfully maintain a monopoly over the cups used in single-serve brewers".

TreeHouse asserts that Green Mountain has been entering into "exclusionary agreements" with suppliers and distributors in order to keep its stranglehold.

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Furthermore, it says that Keurig's 2.0 brewer -- a coffee machine scheduled for launch in late 2014 -- will contain "anti-competitive lockout technology" that will prevent the machines from working with competitive capsules. It's essentially a sort of "DRM" for coffee capsules.

Kuerig has described the 2.0 K-Cup Brewer as containing "interactive technology" which will be able to identify whether an inserted capsule is a licensed "K-cup" or a competitor's capsule even if the capsules are exactly the same shape. How exactly it would work remains to be seen, but Wired.co.uk would guess it would take all of a day to find a workaround.


TreeHouse's lawsuit argues in its legal filing that "such lock-out technology cannot be justified based on any purported consumer benefit" and that it is harmful to competition and consumers because it eliminates choice and forces people to pay higher prices for the Green Mountain capsules.

TreeHouse Foods' CEO said: "We are seeking free and open competition on the merits to bring our customers high quality and innovative products at better prices."

You can read the full legal filing here.

It turns out that coffee machine makers are quite the litigious bunch. This may be because the global coffee capsule market is estimated to be worth $6.6 billion (£3.9 billion). In April 2013, Nespresso (well, parent company Nestec) took Dualit to court in the UK for infringing a European Patent for supplying coffee capsules that worked with the former's machines. In August 2012, Nestec took the Ethical Coffee Company to court in Germany for making coffee capsules under the brands "Espresso" and "Esprimo" that could fit into Nespresso machines. In both cases, judges ruled that there had been no infringement.


In October 2013, Nestec took its case to the European Patent Office, taking on several companies making pods for Nespresso machines. These included DEMB Holding, Distribution Casino France, the Ethical Coffee Company and Casa del Caffe Vergano. While the case in the US is an antitrust one, the European cases all focus on patent law, particularly on whether if you make replaceable coffee capsules you are "making" the patented technology as a whole or not. The courts seem to think not.

At least for now. In order for coffee machine manufacturers to successfully take the patent law approach, they'd need to show that the capsules themselves were truly inventive. Whether an anti-infringement technology counts as patentable remains to be seen.

H/T to Julia Powles (@juliapowles) for legal nous.