Keurig is a beverage brewing system for home and commercial use. The machines are manufactured by the American company Keurig Dr Pepper. The main Keurig products are: K-Cup pods, which are single-serve coffee containers; other beverage pods; and the proprietary machines that use these pods to make beverages. Keurig beverage varieties include hot and cold coffees, teas, cocoas, dairy-based beverages, lemonades, cider, and fruit-based drinks. Through its own brands and its partnership licensed brands, Keurig has over 400 different varieties and over 60 brands of coffee and other beverages. In addition to K-Cup pods it includes Vue, K-Carafe, and K-Mug pods as well. The original single-serve brewer and coffee-pod manufacturing company, Keurig, Inc., was founded in Massachusetts in 1992. It launched its first brewers and K-Cup pods in 1998, targeting the office market. As the single-cup brewing system gained popularity, brewers for home use were added in 2004. In 2006, the publicly traded Vermont-based specialty-coffee company Green Mountain Coffee Roasters acquired Keurig, sparking rapid growth for both companies. In 2012 Keurig's main patent on its K-Cup pods expired, leading to new product launches, including brewer models that only accept pods from Keurig brands. From 2006 to 2014, Keurig, Inc. was a wholly owned subsidiary of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. When Green Mountain Coffee Roasters changed its name to Keurig Green Mountain in March 2014, Keurig ceased to be a separate business unit and subsidiary, and instead became Keurig Green Mountain's main brand. In 2016, Keurig Green Mountain was acquired by an investor group led by private-equity firm JAB Holding Company for nearly $14 billion. In July 2018, Keurig Green Mountain merged with Dr Pepper Snapple Group in a deal worth $18.7 billion, creating Keurig Dr Pepper, a publicly traded conglomerate which is the third largest beverage company in North America. History Inception and development Keurig founders John Sylvan and Peter Dragone had been college roommates at Colby College in Maine in the late 1970s. In the early 1990s, Sylvan, a tinkerer, had quit his tech job in Massachusetts, and wanted to solve the commonplace problem of office coffee – a full pot of brewed coffee which sits and grows bitter, dense, and stale – by creating a single-serving pod of coffee grounds and a machine that would brew it. Living in Greater Boston, he went through extensive trial and error trying to create a pod and a brewing machine. By