A small beverage company called Coca Cola has a problem. Worldwide they currently make over 100 different varieties of drink flavours but they want to make them all available to their customers at once. Existing post-mix systems could not hope to do it, so they sat down and thought about it for 4 years and came up with Freestyle.

By aligning themselves with Voldemort technology Coke have packed the ingredients for all their drinks into a single, replaceable 1.4L (46 oz) cartridge. This cartridge would be used to manufacture the desired drink at the post instead of existing systems which just mix a concentrate with water. To give you some idea of how complicated or subtle this is, the dosing equipment in the machine was designed for kidney dialysis and cancer drug delivery, i.e. it can provide very, very precise amounts of liquid. Hopefully they washed the equipment before they installed it in these machines.

Customers simply choose the drink they want from the selfserve touch screen, the machine does a little pinch of this and a little dash of that and the beverage is dispensed. Not only will it serve soft drink, but also iced teas, vitamin waters, diet soft drinks and juices. The system is currently undergoing trials in restaurants in the US. Personally I think this is very scary, like hardware store paint mixing but for Coke.

Ever had one of those moments where all you wanted was a Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke, but all the fountain could offer you was regular old diet? Coca-Cola is doing away with that problem by introducing a new beverage dispenser. Heralded as the “fountain of the future” by Coke PR flaks, the “Freestyle” … offers more than 100 flavor options.

Tags: gadget, coke+freestyle, coca+cola+freestyle