Woodburn-Simmonds calls the business proposition that you can reproduce restaurant-quality coffee from Dunkin’ K-cups “pretty disingenuous at best.” “Anything that uses pre-ground coffee will be worse than fresh ground from a good grinder. Even though the grounds are sealed in a pod, they have been exposed to air and an industrial-sized grinder, you have lost some of the precious oils that give coffee so much flavor in the processing of the beans,” he tells Mashed.
Woodburn-Simmonds also points out that while K-cups might be convenient in the short term, not only is the coffee it delivers less than perfect, but the plastic vessels themselves are bad for the environment. “They’re really difficult to recycle. In cities where they can be recycled you often have to separate them into their constituent parts and recycle them separately. This obviously isn’t ideal, to be generous,” he says.
