Business Opportunities Weblog

November 13, 2009 by Rich Whittle | 2 Comments

At first, the Freestyle seems like a futuristic novelty: The touchscreen fountain allows you to pick from dozens of Coke products–far more than you could cram into a typical soda fountain. But that belies the real business case for the machine, reports Fast Company.

It’s the machine’s guts that tell the real story. The fountain’s flavors come not from big bags of concentrate but from precision inkjet printer cartridges, a concept borrowed from the medical industry.

The benefits are two-fold. The printer cartridges contain extremely concentrated syrup, which massively cuts down on shipping costs and on the company’s carbon footprint–one 46-ounce cartridge equals an old-time 5-gallon bag.

But just as important, the cartridges also track exactly what’s being dispensed in real-time. That provides a continuous data stream to Coke about what’s catching the consumer’s fancy.

So you could, for example, track how a new product performs–down to the ounce–shortly after its introduction.

Photo by Fast Company.

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Tags: Beverage, Innovation