Don’t be alarmed if the Wegmans superfans in your life start bragging about how hot their coffee is.
The Philadelphia-based chain La Colombe is brewing up a storm with a new line of self-heating coffee cans, which it plans to take to Wegmans.
The cans are seemingly simple devices: With 1 twist and 2 minutes of time, the coffee inside spikes to 130 F. But the underlying technology is more retro — and more complicated — than you might think.
Self-heating cans have a bitter history
Turns out, the original Thermos enthusiasts were czarist Russians. In 1897, the engineer Yevgeny Fedorov introduced devices for heating meat stews, but self-heated cans didn’t catch sparks until World War II.
During the Battle of Normandy, the US military slipped self-heated soup mugs into ration packs for its soldiers. Those mugs, however, had an unfortunate propensity for spontaneous combustion.
Caution: Coffee may be lukewarm
Since then, many of the biggest names in coffee have tried and failed to break the seal on the self-heating market.
In the early 2000s, Nestlé UK experimented with its own product, called Hot When You Want. But the coffee underwhelmed in cold weather — inspiring customers to nickname it “warm when you want.”
That hasn’t stopped a handful of startups — like the 42 Degrees Company and HeatGen — from betting that they can beat the self-heating curse.
But they might once again get the cold shoulder: As any market analyst can tell you, young coffee guzzlers have the hots for iced coffee right now.