Hacking the Verismo from Starbucks

I’ve been wanting a home pod coffee machine for a while now, but everyone you speak to has a different opinion on which is better, and to be honest its all based on whichever one they’ve owned so ive taken most reviews with a pinch of salt.

I had been eyeing up the Tassimo machines as they had Costa coffees and lots of hot chocolate flavours but they were very bulky and for anything that looked half decent you bloody paid for it! Then i kind of lost a bit of steam for the whole thing as I looked into it all more and more and there were lots more machines coming on to the market – it got swamped and I got bored!

A few months later we were visiting a customer of ours who specialise in domestic appliances and noticed they had started selling the Verismo from Starbucks, a Pod coffee machine licensed by K-FEE and that boasted lots of different types of coffees which all looked great! We walked out with 3 machines – each with 90 delicious pods to use!

One of the Verismo machines took a spot in my kitchen at home and we very quickly used the initial 90 drinks we got with it so i started shopping around for more pods for it and found myself on eBay and was presented with some very interesting finds.

I found some “Espresto” pods for sale, they are made by the same company behind the Verismo machine – K-FEE and from the encouraging description on the eBay listing it seemed like these pods may fit my machine and I may have just found a way of stocking it without breaking the bank!

The pods arrived, I held one next to a Starbucks one – and guess what? They are identical! This means that things like milk pods can be sourced cheaper, and also you can get hot chocolate pods which are something Starbucks dont offer for the Verismo system – they taste great too!

I instantly ordered loads of milk and chocolate and even one of their coffees to try and its all good quality stuff – the range of pods available to me had opened up!

On one of the listings for the Espresto pods it also mentioned “PodPronto” which turns out to be a machine sold by Tesco and – again – licenced by K-FEE – so low and behold, the pods from that fit too!

So now, not only can i buy cheaper milk and coffee pods on eBay i can also walk down to my local Tesco and buy their pods – even cheaper!

I’m investigating if any other machines have pods we can use, and i’ll keep this post updated – im sure they make other machines for other people so shouldn’t be hard to track down.

[UPDATE] I have been informed that Tesco are discontinuing their PodPronto machine  – so get all the pods from your local store before its too late!