Keurig founder Peter Dragone is working with a cannabis accessories company to bring the convenience of pre-filled pods to the legal weed industry.
Dragone originally launched Keurig’s convenient coffee brewing system back in 2004. The company’s single-serve pre-filled plastic K-Cups became an instant hit, and now adorn the counters of many an office break room. With that success behind him, Dragone has joined the executive team of Convenient Cannabis, a Kentucky company that is hoping to make pot pods just as ubiquitous as K-Cups.
The company’s new Puffsy pods are pre-filled with a single serving of ground cannabis flower. But unlike Keurig’s pods, which are made from plastic that is extremely hard to recycle, Puffsy pods are made from recyclable glass. The pods slot right in to most standard bongs and pipes, eliminating the time-consuming task of grinding fresh bud and packing it in by hand.
“We mitigate all that. We’re selling convenience,” said Convenient Cannabis CEO and founder Zechariah Corcimiglia to MJBizDaily. “I’m basically trying to build this model off of a Keurig business model.”
Convenient Cannabis has been selling its Puffsy pods in California since March. Now that Dragone is on board, the company is hoping to raise an additional $1 million to expand its reach into other adult-use states. The Keurig founder is not directly investing in the company, but will instead act as CFO and strategic advisor.
“He has this large network of venture capitalists and angel investors,” Corcimiglia explained to MJBizDaily. “He is coming on as an equity partner and getting us ready for our Series A round of financing.”
Dragone is actually not even the first Keurig executive to jump ship for the cannabis industry. Dave Manly, the company’s former senior vice president, became the CEO of CannaKorp, a Massachusetts company that produces a Keurig-inspired vaporizer, in 2015. The two executives’ shift from coffee to bud is indicative of a larger migration of executives from traditional companies into the cannabis sector.
Alcohol industry leaders were some of the first to see the writing on the wall. Cannabis companies have been poaching booze industry execs since 2017, and the heir to the Jim Beam business even started his own legal weed company in Canada. Not to be outdone, the billionaire heir to the Wrigley’s chewing gum fortune also joined the board of a medical marijuana company in 2018. The weed industry is so lucrative, in fact, that it has even enticed former prohibitionist Republicans like John Boehner to take leading roles at weed companies.
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