Coke Goes High-Tech to Mix Its Sodas
Coca-Cola Co. hopes a new high-tech soda fountain will add some life to listless soft-drink sales by letting restaurant-goers mix up 104 different drinks, creating inventions such as Caffeine-Free Diet Raspberry Coke.
The soda fountain has been the touchstone of Coke’s business since 1886, when a pharmacist John Pembertoncreated the secret-recipe syrup and mixed it with carbonated water. But the technology hasn’t changed much since the 1950s, as a line of nozzles spit out big-name sodas.
Coke’s new Freestyle machine is housed in a curved metal shell created by the designers of Ferrari race cars, and features a touch-screen menu. Inside, technology common in measuring tiny doses of chemotherapy drugs is used to release digitally-controlled amounts of concentrate flavor from dozens of plastic cartridges.
But the Freestyle’s complicated technology and expense—Coke charges 30% more for it than traditional fountains—have slowed its way into stores. Five years after the company began developing the Freestyle, it’s still only in tests in a handful of stores. Coke declined to say how much it charges for the machines or how much it has spent on the project.
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