Keurig is a company that makes a product that produces an insane amount of plastic waste and a little bit of coffee. They’re also a company that thought this idea was so brilliant that it needed to be locked down under DRM — a system which, as you might expect, was utterly destroyed in no time flat.
Now they’re also company that is recalling 7 million coffee makers.
Before you get your hopes up: no, they’re not recalling the coffee makers because they’ve realized the whole DRM thing was a bad idea.
They’re recalling the coffee makers because instead of making coffee*, some of the machines are burning people. WHOOPS.
[* Or perhaps “in addition to making coffee”, but if your coffee maker shoots hot steam in your face you probably don’t want the coffee anymore anyway]
These little machines are in just about every startup and tech company office I’ve been in (hell, we’ve got one), so I figured it was worth a note.
According to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, water in the affected units “can overheat during brewing, spray out and burn consumers.”
So far the company has received roughly 200 reports of “hot liquid escaping from the brewer”, about half of which have lead to burns.
The machine impacted here is the Keurig MINI Plus Brewing System, built and sold from 2009 until now. It looks like this:
If that looks/sounds like a machine you’ve got around the house/office, here are the details on how to check if yours is a part of the recall.