Minnesota Company Replicated Keurig’s K-Cups, Alleges Former Customer Stole Its Coffee Pod Tech – CoffeeTalk

In 2014, Minnesota-based tech company Microtrace helped a generic coffee-pod maker crack Keurig’s top-secret ink signature to ensure its knockoff pods could work with the newest versions of the popular single-serve coffee machines. TreeHouse Foods, a $3.4 billion manufacturer of store-brand and private label groceries, is now accused of reverse-engineering its own breakthrough. TreeHouse allegedly broke contracts by using, relying on, and reverse-engineering taggant ink, confidential information, and trade secrets provided by Microtrace in a way that was not permitted.

When Keurig released its next-generation coffee machine in 2014, the devices came with a sensor that would recognize only Keurig-brand K-cups with a special “fingerprint” in an attempt to ward off competitors. Without this unique chemical “taggant” printed on the coffee pod, the brewer wouldn’t work. Competition for Keurig, including TreeHouse, faced immense pressure to decipher and replicate Keurig’s sophisticated spectral taggant signature technology to continue to compete in the marketplace.

While many major coffee brands decided to keep working with Keurig rather than try to produce their own competing pods, TreeHouse asked Microtrace to engineer a solution that could ensure its private label pods worked with the new machines. Microtrace, which has developed taggants for anti-counterfeiting and other uses for several decades, invested tens of thousands of hours and millions of dollars to crack the code.

The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages from Microtrace, TreeHouse, its subsidiary Bay Valley Foods, and printer ProAmpac. The case had anti-competitive issues from the very beginning, as the use of technology to prevent competition is problematic. Reverse-engineering is not against the law, but the suit centers on the contract that prohibited TreeHouse from using Microtrace’s approach. TreeHouse will likely claim that the technology is no longer a trade secret, as other “third-party workarounds” to gain access to Keurig machines had hit the market in the years after Microtrace started working with TreeHouse.

Read More @ The Minnesota Star Tribune