When you roast beans, you introduce CO2. For a few hours after roasting, CO2 escapes, which is the process called degassing or off-gassing. When you grind, more CO2 escapes. Limiting CO2 impact on coffee is well understood by the industry -- you can degas in a nitrogen environment, for example.

We at HiLine Coffee did a lot of testing with different single-serve pods, and I can assure you that you can tell the quality changes over time (what you get with 1 month old pod and what you get after 6 months taste very different). This is one of the reasons why Nespresso, Keurig and other large manufacturers don't state the date of the roast on packaging. People wouldn't want to buy 6 months old coffee. Instead they buy coffee that is "best consumed by" a date in 6 months, whatever that means, particularly since stale coffee doesn't have any discernible health effects other than sadness from poor taste. After spending more than a year working on new ways to better preserve ground coffee in single serve packaging, we determined that the only sure way to deliver fresh and great tasting coffee in a pod is to roast for each individual order. This is the model that we are testing now. If you want to try it, check us out at https://www.hilinecoffee.com or send us an email for free sample.