Starbucks gives up exclusive license to high-end Keurig pods

March 18, 2014 Leave a comment

Starbucks gives up exclusive license to high-end Keurig pods

9:20am EDT

(Reuters) – Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O: Quote, Profile,Research, Stock Buzz) will get a wider selection of Keurig Green Mountain Inc’s (GMCR.O: Quote, Profile, Research,Stock Buzz) single-serve K-Cup coffee packs, in exchange for giving up the exclusive license for Keurig’s highest-end coffee packs, the companies said on Friday.

The terms are changes to the five-year agreement the two companies reached last year that tripled the number of Starbucks drinks sold in K-Cups, adding Seattle’s Best and Torrefazione Italia coffees, Teavana teas and Starbucks cocoa.

Under terms of the 2013 deal, which replaced their first agreement in 2011, Starbucks kept the exclusive rights to be the licensed “super-premium coffee” brand on the Keurig K-Cup platforms.

The Keurig machine popularized the use of pods, small packets containing everything from coffee, tea or hot chocolate powder, for easy, in-home, one-cup brewing of hot drinks.

The company has sold more than 30 million Keurig machines around the world for use in homes, offices and other locations.

 

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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