As of today, Terra Kaffe released its first major software and firmware update across all provisioned TK-02s in the country. Nearly 7 thousand machines received a new set of enhancements that will change and improve how espresso shots get brewed, focusing on maintaining a higher temperature.

Terra Kaffe is unique in the way we gain insights and use customer feedback. Since our founding in 2018, we’ve made customer focus a critical pillar of our company. TK-02 was designed based entirely on suggestions from our TK-01 community, and the updates we push to TK-02 are no different! Thanks to the streamlined communication between our Coffee Concierge team, engineering department, and our TK-02 owners, we easily determined what feature customers wanted to see next — and we got right to work!

“Given the immense amount of customer feedback that led to the creation of TK-02, it's only natural that we'd want to do the same in prioritizing TK-02's continuous improvements,” says Cate Marques, our head of Customer Experience. “The beauty of a connected machine is that it gets better over time, especially when we have ongoing insights from an engaged community. As we always say, keep the feedback coming; it's the number one way we get better.”

The nuts and bolts

There’s so much customers already love about TK-02 (we just surpassed over 2 million drinks brewed!), but the fact that it’s a connected device is about so much more than just the features you get right out of the box. Being able to update software over time is a true testament to its longevity and continual improvement (if your new iPhone were forever stuck at iOS 1, you’d be missing out on a lot of innovation!).

Customers let our team know that they wanted their espresso to come out of the machine hotter. Our engineering team investigated these concerns, collected data from scores of different possible solutions, and implemented the best combination of improvements. This implementation required weeks and weeks of software development, performance testing, and reliability testing. With this update, we made the brewing temperature more precise to your espresso profile settings by increasing the thermoblock’s set brew point temperature. Says Director of Engineering & Quality, Andrew: “We are beyond excited to share our “hottest” product enhancement to date. Our team has been working endlessly to release a noticeable temperature improvement to TK-02 espresso-based drinks.”

We also made the brewing temperature more accurate to your selected settings by slightly decreasing the flow rate (how fast or slow water moves through the pump) for espresso shots, which helps extract flavor better. Moreover, we’ve completely re-evaluated the processes and systems around the heating elements to reduce drastic temperature drops throughout the day when the machine sits idle. This enhancement is two-fold. Some of the update addresses processes in the background, but we’ve also added a brand-new feature to further improve temperature control that you can opt into through your settings on the machine’s screen.

We call this feature a “water purge,” which you can set to occur any time you bring your machine out of standby. Over time between brews, water that sits in the tubes comes to room temperature, which (when combined with freshly heated water) can reduce the overall brew temperature. With this toggle selected on your machine, the TK-02 will always discard any water that’s been sitting for too long before preparing a new shot.

We’re so excited about continually improving our customers’ brewing experience and helping them find their always-perfect cup of coffee. In pursuit of always making mornings better, our Mobile Experience Lead, Jenny, says it best: “We’re building a product that lives in your home and that you use every day, and we want it to be useful, beautiful, and easy. This is why we do what we do…at TK, the customer is always our guiding star.” This update is the first of many; we’ll continue taking customers’ feedback and enhancing TK-02 — because the world’s most advanced espresso machine can only get better with time.

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