Starbucks & Coinstar Unite To Sell Seattle’s Best Coffee In Kiosks

If you think Starbucks’ penetration into the world of coffee-selling is already at the saturation point, the company would kindly like to disagree with you. It has announced a deal with Coinstar to roll out thousands of automated kiosks that would sell $1 cups of Starbucks’ Seattle’s Best brand of coffee.

The kiosks, named Rubi, will be positioned in a lot of the same types of places you already see Coinstar’s Redbox DVD machines — drugstores, supermarkets, large retail stores — and will offer seven varieties of ground-to-order coffee, but only in one size cup.

Coinstar hopes to roll out 500 machines by the end of the year, with the dream goal of reaching 15,000 kiosks someday. Each kiosk is expected to sell at least 10,000 cups a year for an average of around 27 cups a day.

The companies said it’s looking into how to expand the size offerings of the Rubi kiosks. Iced coffee could also be a possibility for future iterations of the machine.

If anyone spots one of these Rubi machines (they are already being tested in a few locations), we’d love to have photos for our Flickr pool. Or you could shoot it and send it directly to the tipline via the Consumerist Tipster app for iPhone and Android.

Starbucks Signs Five-Year Deal with Coinstar for Seattle’s Best Kiosks [FoxBusiness.com]

Starbucks Unit in Coinstar Kiosk Deal [Bloomberg]

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