Hot Cup of Hype

If you regularly drink common, canned, grocery-store coffee, you may notice that sometimes it tastes pretty good, and other times (most times, in fact) it tastes OK at best.

Folgers, the No. 1 packaged coffee in the United States, is trying to do something about that. The New York Times reports that Procter & Gamble, which still owns the brand (it's selling Folgers to J.M. Smucker in a deal that will close later this year), is getting ready to announce a new roasting method that will supposedly improve "cup to cup consistency and flavor quality," according to Jamie Egasti, P&G's coffee chief.

As competitors such as Starbucks have blanketed the nation with higher-quality, more expensive Arabica beans over the past couple of decades, brands such as Folgers and Maxwell House, which generally use Robusta beans, have positioned themselves as the lower-cost alternative. At the same time, they have tried to compete with higher-end coffees by introducing "gourmet" and flavored blends.

P&G has overhauled its main coffee plant in New Orleans. The plant will incorporate a new step called "predry," wherein the beans are fully dried before roasting, which the company says will remove much of the bitterness.

Folgers calls the new roasting method "the biggest innovation since the launch of decaf."

That's a ridiculous overstatement, to say the least. Predrying beans is hardly an innovation, much less a world-changing one. Even Gawker, the snarky media blog, felt compelled to weigh in.