The Other Coffee Success Story

Search “Starbucks books” on Amazon and you get 100 pages of results.

Search “Green Mountain Coffee books” on Amazon and you get 8 pages of results.

Some of the Starbucks relevant search results include:

• Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time
• The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary
• Onward: How Starbucks Fought for its Life without Losing its Soul
• Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles for Connecting with Your Customers, Your Products and Your People
• Many, many more.

Green Mountain Coffee’s results:

• Brewing Change: Behind the Beat at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters

That’s it. That’s all you get. The book isn’t even about Green Mountain’s business strategy; it’s about leading the coffee industry towards sustainability.

That probably makes sense to most. Starbucks is a successful international company that is credited with popularizing gourmet coffee. What is Green Mountain other than those default K-Cups you get when buy a Keurig coffee machine?

But that’s exactly what they are. Green Mountain was an original investor in Keurig in the early 90s, and then bought a controlling interest in the company in the early 2000s. That $160 million investment has returned over $1 billion for Green Mountain. They had a patent on K-Cup technology until 2012.

Today, about one in every four coffee machines bought for home consumption is a Keurig. Green Mountain invested in and then bought out what has become one of the most popular, if not the most popular, ways to consume coffee.

To me, this would be like the New York Times buying Twitter in 2008 to have a better way to distribute their news.

So, where the hell are all the books on Green Mountain’s business strategy?