GE To Sell Refrigerator With Built-In Wi-Fi-Enabled Coffeemaker

By Laura Northrup January 15, 2015

(GE)

A few years ago, the brilliant appliance designers over at GE and Samsung introduced refrigerators with water dispensers that could carbonate and heat water, right there in the fridge door. This idea didn’t really catch on. Now built-in small appliances are about to become even more specific with GE’s new idea for a thing to install in the refrigerator door: a Keurig single-serve coffee maker.

Our convenient colleagues down the hall at Consumer Reports brought our attention to this new product. No, it’s not the DRM-laden Keurig 2.0 system, but the older single-serve K-Cup system that can also make hot chocolate, iced tea, and soup.

GE claims that this is a feature that customers have actually asked for, especially after they introduced those refrigerators dispensing hot water in 2013. These customers wanted the ability to have the fridge dispense coffee or tea without having to navigate the use of instant coffee or teabags, maybe.

In GE’s press release about this new and exciting product, they quote Keurig’s chief product officer of hot beverage systems. “As an innovator in the personal beverage system industry,” Mark Wood says, because the “personal beverage system industry” is an actual thing, “Keurig is excited to partner with GE and to be the first to offer hot single-cup technology right from a refrigerator.”

The personal beverage system refrigerators will be available in the latter half of 2015, on GE’s refrigerators that have French doors and a freezer drawer on the bottom.