1. Paper packaging is much more fragile than plastic packaging. Boxes permanently dent, buckle when compressed, tear much more easily, etc, when enduring punishment that a plastic container will shrug off. Paper is also much less resistant to water damage. Paper-packaged products like milk cartons or juice boxes are usually transported in durable, rigid-walled crates, and would probably do much worse than the previous plastic bottle in a regular door-delivery use-case.
2. I've always found the relatively low rigidity of the whole assemblage to make sipping directly from a TetraPak sort-of-thing a little slippery and uneasy. The box can warp in all sorts of ways. Maybe I've just been burned by spilling milk on my shirt late at night trying to drink from the carton...
3. Bag-in-box specifically doesn't "scale down" to single servings that well. The experience of drinking out of a bladder within a larger box is less-than-ideal because the bladder can slosh around inside the container. Maybe if they aimed to sell bulk wet Soylent fluid, bag-in-box would be the way to go.
A few years ago I took a two week river trip with a buddy. We bought three boxes of wine.
We nixed the boxes, and the wine bladders were just strapped to to raft with all our other stuff.
At the end of the trip, we we both surprised how much abuse those bags went through, and not even a small leak.
Now--the raft was another story.
Isn't part of their marketing greeness? But their model is keurig-for-calories? They _could_ refuse to do the plastic bottles and ship paper bags of powder...
[1] http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/carbios-opaque-pet-mil...
It's a simple, self-contained way to freshly and quickly brew a single cup of coffee with no mess, and priced for consumers: Cutting a few annoying chores out of a rushed morning at a cost of a few tens of cents per cup.
In what world was that ever a hard sell?
It shouldn't be too much harder to add "pods" (powder containers) to that device. It might even make the process easier because the machine wouldn't have to measure the right amount.
But it would t make a nice blog post of be as distinctive brandwise
It also makes for much more compact trash as you can fold and reseal them almost completely flat. Plastic bottles can be "compressed" but they still waste significant space
"Just don't make it a bag and have the consumer have to squeeze it" - c.f. Juicero