Keurig brews a more perfect cup of coffee with Azure IoT Central

Building a smarter cup of coffee

Perhaps nothing is more subjective than a perfect cup of coffee. Achieving the optimal rich, flavorful, aromatic brew for each individual taste requires a perfect blend of beans, roast parameters, pressure, and temperature. To cater more effectively to individual tastes, Keurig recently introduced a new line of smart brewers with BrewID™ technology. BrewID recognizes more than 900 varieties and more than 100 brands of K-Cup® pods, and offers up brew settings recommended by the roaster to achieve optimal flavor.

“BrewID enables a closer connection with our consumers by offering them a coffee creation as the roaster originally intended, and allowing them to modify the brew as they wish, to match their individual tastes,” says Roger Johnson, Chief Product Officer at Keurig Dr Pepper. “We believe this really optimizes the experience for each consumer that we serve.”

The brewers connect to Wi-Fi, allowing users to start the brew from the Keurig mobile app or through a voice command to Google Home or Alexa. Smart and connected appliances create a continuous improvement loop for the brew settings and the brewers.

“The connected products give us really rich insight into consumer behavior and coffee trends, which allows us to improve both current and future products for our consumers,” says Jamal Wilson, VP, Product Management at Keurig Dr Pepper.

To realize this goal, Keurig needed an Internet of Things (IoT) platform to anchor a connected solution with rich benefits for consumers. Specifically, Keurig was looking for:

• A robust, comprehensive technical solution with secure data exchange, over-the-air support for rapid updates, and rich built-in functionality that would minimize the amount of IoT development effort required so the Keurig team could focus on offering up a perfect cup of coffee.
• Scalability to economically and reliably support millions of connected Keurig brewers.
• A deep collaboration with a technology partner so Keurig could continue to focus on innovating in the coffee and appliance space.

After exploring various IoT platforms, the Keurig product team narrowed its choices to Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Central. They focused on those two platforms because both provide a highly secure and scalable solution that integrates easily with business apps. This would allow Keurig to connect and manage millions of devices, visualize the insights those devices generate, and act on those insights. The question was whether Keurig wanted to build its own connectivity with IoT Hub or take advantage of the built-in connectivity of the Azure IoT Central hosted platform. 

Buying vs. building connectivity

The first product on Keurig’s connected-brewer roadmap was the K-Supreme Plus® Smart Brewer. While Keurig was testing Azure IoT Central in the lab, the Keurig product development team built the first home test version of the new brewer on Azure IoT Hub. The Keurig product team found that IoT Hub provided rich functionality but required more development time.

“Our decision on the IoT platform revolved around the question, ‘Do we build or buy?’,” says Wilson. “Azure IoT Central was appealing to us because it did a lot of things that we would have had to build, stitch together, and manage ourselves. Reducing the development time and complexity required to build and maintain IoT-scale systems was really important in helping us accelerate time to market and reduce risk.”

Based on that analysis, Keurig built its first at-scale product on Azure IoT Central. Because developers were able to reuse most of the IoT-related code from prior deployments on IoT Hub, they were able to ship out the second brewer just two months later.

“We reduced development time by 30 to 50 percent with Azure IoT Central, compared to what we were looking at with IoT Hub,” says Tony Marandola, Vice President, Software at Keurig Dr Pepper. “We’re finding that we can add a brewer to Azure IoT Central within a month or two, which is incredible. I’ve never had an IoT product that we could segue into different product lines rather than bringing each one up as a first of a kind.”

Connecting to a better customer experience

Keurig uses the Azure IoT Central API to integrate with other apps, such as the Keurig mobile app, Google Home, and Alexa, and to provide a consistent experience at the API level for commercial vendors that place and manage brewers in business settings. 

“To get at device data, we took advantage of the Azure IoT Central API, which is robust and mapped very closely to what we wanted to expose to our internal and external systems,” says Marandola. 

When a customer puts a pod in the Keurig brewer, it seamlessly communicates with the companion mobile app. If there’s something that’s useful for a user to know about the process, a message appears in the mobile app in near real-time.

“One of the best things we found in Azure IoT Central was the data-export ability that allows us to take any property changes that occur on the device, forward them to other Azure and non-Azure components, and process them,” says Marandola. “Being able to get all that information back through the continuous data-export capabilities helps us provide a very good customer experience.”

Customers can also subscribe to Keurig SMART Auto-Delivery, which uses BrewID to track pod use and automatically reorder inventory at exactly the right time. “We learn what our consumers love so we're able to offer them a Goldilocks’ pantry of varieties that suit them,” says Johnson. “This helps us create a more one-to-one relationship with each consumer that we serve.”

Orchestrating continuous improvement

With its IoT-enabled brewers, Keurig is striving to constantly improve the consumer experience with the coffee, the brewer, and the company. Insights gained on all types of real-world issues that consumers experience are used to improve current and future products. Updates can be automatically applied to brewers already in the field.

“With over-the-air functionality, we can deliver product enhancements and new features to our customers and offer a product that gets even better over time,” says Wilson. “Keurig is able to innovate quickly and make data-driven decisions through a feedback loop that is much faster and richer than the traditional approach.” That feedback loop also provides the Keurig customer care team with near real-time brewer performance data to help them resolve issues more quickly than ever before.

In addition, the development team was able to quickly build a fleet management dashboard that they use to manage the frequency and sources of data exchange, review brewer errors, and launch brewer updates.

“We were able to build a dashboard in mere hours to manage our ever-growing fleet of brewers. That helped us skip over what would have probably been a six-month engineering exercise,” says Marandola. “Many features that we would have had to build from scratch to make the solution tick are basically included in Azure IoT Central.”