Vermont-based Keurig Green Mountain, a pioneer in the coffee-pod business, will now become part of the same conglomerate that owns Peet's Coffee & Tea and, as of recently, Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Intelligentsia Coffee, as the LA Times and others are reporting. Keurig is getting acquired by an investor group led by JAB Holding Co. which also owns Minnesota-based Caribou Coffee and marks just the latest consolidation in the ever booming coffee industry.

But the announcement comes after a fairly bad year for Keurig, whose stock price had lost half its value as of Friday in the face of growing competition from other pod-coffee companies like Nespresso, and criticism over the fact that its coffee pods represent a huge source of unrecyclable waste. As CNN Money reports, an investment by Coca-Cola in the company earlier this year will now just break even, as its stock price has since surged 78 percent on the news.

"Keurig Green Mountain represents a major step forward in the creation of our global coffee platform,” says Bart Becht, chairman at JAB. “It is a fantastic company that uniquely brings together premium coffee brands and new beverage dispensing technologies like the famous Keurig single-serve machine."

Keurig will remain independently operated, and based in Waterbury, Vermont. They have promised to make all their coffee pods recyclable by 2020, though it's unclear why it should take so long when competitors have already done this.

Previously: Bay Area-Based Peet's Coffee & Tea Buys Portland-Based Stumptown