Half of the coffee served online comes from pods

Coffee pods: a convenient way to make a cup of joe, or a wasteful plastic product? Scrutiny aside, coffee manufactures continue to distill new coffee capsules; brands are even embracing environmental awareness by offering fully compostable pods. Slice Intelligence brewed a fresh pot of data and found that despite the environmental outcry, online pod orders are highly caffeinated: coffee capsule orders grew by 53 percent over the past 12 months and accounted for over half of all coffee orders online.

Nespresso and K-Cup, by Keurig, lead in online sales of coffee capsules. We counted the hypothetical coffee beans and found that K-Cups are the most ordered capsule, as 44 percent of coffee pod orders were made for K-Cup compatible brewers. While Nespresso pods are ordered less, these more expensive capsules generate the majority of pod revenue. Nespresso capsule purchases accounted for 56 percent of pod sales last year.

Customers who purchased Nespresso were willing to pay a premium on their morning cup of joe. Shoppers spent $78 dollars per Nespresso order, which is $45 dollars more than the average K-Cup order, and ordered 30 percent more often than their K-Cup counterparts.

In addition to the convenience of instant coffee, the pod system also gives buyers the versatility to brew a variety of coffee flavors without a barista's supervision. Coffee drinkers who bought Nespresso pods preferred variety packs, as a quarter of online purchases were of the packs that have flavors covering the whole java spectrum.

Among K-Cup buyers, flavor diversity doesn't seem to be a focus. Nearly 30 percent of K-Cups purchased online in the past year were on the original Green Mountain and Donut Shop packs. Here's the full breakdown:

With a panel of over 5 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world.