BrewBird.

Here is a business that sounds, on first hearing, slightly absurd. BrewBird sells a coffee machine for about $10,000. The machine makes single cups. Each cup costs the customer roughly $2 in pods. You could, reasonably, ask why anyone would pay five figures for a device that dispenses coffee one cup at a time when a drip pot and a bag of beans exists and costs approximately nothing.

The answer is that the drip pot and the bag of beans produce bad coffee, and everyone knows it, and the coffee at your office is a small daily disappointment that you have collectively agreed to ignore. BrewBird's bet is that this disappointment is worth $10,000 to fix - not to you, but to the company that employs you and would like you to come into the building.

The machine brews whole beans, not pre-ground plastic pods. It does a pour-over - the finicky, hand-poured method that specialty cafes fetishize - in about 60 seconds. The beans come from actual roasters you might recognize: Sightglass, Verve, Equator, Ritual. And the pod that holds them is fully compostable, which is the part that makes the sustainability people happy and the plastic-guilt people relieved.

What makes it clever is the QR code. Every pod carries one, and it tells the machine the precise water temperature and brew time for the specific beans inside. This is a nice bit of engineering sleight of hand: it takes the judgment that a trained barista carries in their head and encodes it onto a sticker. The craft scales. The barista does not have to.