---
title: "Plastic-free coffee makers from Caraway and Simply Good Coffee sell out at $495 and $399.99"
url: https://badiyaa.com/plastic-free-coffee-makers-caraway-simply-good-coffee/
published: 2026-11-03T09:03:00+00:00
modified: 2026-11-03T09:03:00+00:00
section: Lifestyle
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Plastic-free coffee makers from Caraway and Simply Good Coffee sell out at $495 and $399.99

Caraway says its $495 glass-and-steel drip machine will not be discounted this holiday season and ships in January; Simply Good Coffee's rival is sold out too. A guide to what the plastic-free label actually covers.

A drip coffee maker with no plastic anywhere water touches now sells for $495 at Caraway, and the company says it is not discounting it for Black Friday. Batch 5 is sold out; batch 6 is estimated to ship on January 25.

Across town in the plastic-free aisle, Simply Good Coffee lists its first-generation Brewer at $399.99, marked down from $479.99, and it too shows as sold out. Both companies make the same promise in slightly different words: from reservoir to carafe, your coffee meets only glass, stainless steel and, in one case, silicone.

## What the two machines cost, side by side

Caraway’s 10-Cup Coffee Maker: $495, glass water tank, stainless steel water path, shower head, brew basket and warming plate, glass carafe, reusable steel filter, a 90-minute warmer and a two-year warranty. The company says it brews between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit.

Simply Good Coffee’s Brewer (1st Gen): $399.99 on sale, eight cups in about six minutes, borosilicate glass reservoir and carafe, 304 stainless steel boiler and plumbing, medical-grade silicone seals, a 30-second bloom cycle, #4 paper filters and a five-year replacement warranty.

For scale, Simply Good Coffee’s own comparison chart on the product page puts a Technivorm Moccamaster at $359, an OXO Brew 8-Cup at $229 and a Ratio Eight at $800, all of which it describes as having plastic somewhere in the brew path. The one exception it concedes is the BUNN VP-17SS, a $500 commercial unit.

## What “plastic-free” covers, and what it does not

Read the fine print and the claim is narrower than the marketing suggests. Neither company says the machine contains no plastic at all. The promise is about the brew path: the parts that hold cold water, heat it, spray it over the grounds and collect the coffee. Housings, dials, cords and feet are a different matter.

Simply Good Coffee goes further than Caraway on one point, promising no aluminum in the path either, and it names the exact components: shower arm, shower head, filter basket and lid, reservoir floor cover, internal plumbing, boiler and carafe top. Caraway lists five stages (tank, water path, shower head, brew basket, carafe) and notes that the product complies with California’s AB 1200, a cookware disclosure law.

So the useful questions for any machine that calls itself plastic-free are three. Does hot water touch plastic? Does cold water sit in plastic before brewing? And are the seals silicone or something else?

## What the research actually measured

The anxiety driving these sales has a specific origin in peer-reviewed work on hot water and polypropylene, the plastic used in many kitchen products. A 2020 study in Nature Food by Dunzhu Li and colleagues tested polypropylene infant feeding bottles during formula preparation and found they released as many as 16.2 million microplastic particles per liter. The team reported that sterilization and exposure to high-temperature water significantly increased release, and a 21-day test showed the shedding fluctuated rather than stopping.

Two cautions belong next to that number. First, the study looked at feeding bottles, not coffee makers, and nobody has published an equivalent per-liter count for a drip machine. Second, the authors did not claim harm; they wrote that the exposure levels highlight an urgent need to assess whether such levels pose a risk, which is a call for more research rather than a verdict.

## Who is buying

Simply Good Coffee’s product page shows 2,690 reviews averaging 4.8 out of 5 and claims more than 100,000 homes. One reviewer wrote on October 13 that they went looking for a machine that would not add microplastics to breakfast; another, on October 17, said the main draw was programming it the night before.

The cheapest route to a plastic-free cup still costs far less than either machine: a stovetop moka pot or a glass pour-over cone with a steel filter. Caraway’s next batch ships January 25.

## Further reading

- [Nature Food (2020): Microplastic release from polypropylene feeding bottles](https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-020-00171-y)

*Image: Padaguan, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*