“Tea, Earl Grey, Hot”

I wasn’t planning to do a follow-up to the gold vending machine story, but things hit my desk as they will, and this one was just too good to let slip away. I’m sure most of you have encountered coffee vending machines, which will stir up a blend of instant crystals, sweetener, artificial (powdered) creamer, and whatever amount of water is appropriate, and dispense an approximation of your favorite coffee drink. Older readers may just remember when soda machines existed, which would mix your choice of syrup and carbonated water into a paper cup with ice, producing something that might almost taste like your preferred pop. But the new development coming from the Coca-Cola people is starting to look more and more like a Star Trek ™ replicator ™…

According to a story off the Fast Company technology website, the Coke people are planning to roll out a new vending machine that uses the technology from ink-jet printers to combine a set of syrups into any one of 104 different combinations, effectively reproducing just some of the thousands of mixtures the company sells around the world. While it’s expected that most of the sales for these things will come from people mixing up a standard product, the field tests of the system resulted in most customers mixing up very strange combinations, just to taste them and find out what Strawberry-Litchi-Nut Diet Coke would be like. If this behavior translates into regular consumer behavior, the new Coke machines – called “Freestyle” machines – could completely change the way people buy soft drinks. It could also result in massive sales and even more massive profits…

Unlike a bottled soda, where the costs of the bottle, the cap, filling and sealing the container, stamping the sell-by date on somewhere, and so on must all be taken into consideration, the drink you get from a fountain operation costs almost nothing to make. In fact, the most expensive part of a food-service soft drink is usually the cup. In the case of the Freestyle machines, the only significant costs should be depreciation on the machine itself, and whatever the costs of keeping its advanced sprayers and super-chillers working might be; the cost of the syrup is no higher than any other soft drink and the water and electrical costs should be negligible. If the engineers have done their job as well as the Coke people have with their creation of flavor choices, these things should simply be little profit centers…

Of course, Coke doesn’t currently sell any hot beverages. But modifying these machines to produce the flavor of tea – or even coffee – should just be a matter of figuring out how much of which flavor component goes into each cup; heating it would then be a simple matter of microwave or electrical element. It’s not hard to imagine the same technology being used to produce an on-demand source for literally any beverage you can think of, although alcohol would increase both the logistic and political complexities by several orders of magnitude, and should probably be avoided. Still, at that point, all you’d really need to do is improve the voice-recognition software that people are already using on desktop computers and add that option to the touch-screen controls currently on a Freestyle, and you’ve effectively got the machines we all wanted to have in the kitchen when we were kids…

Of course, as with the gold vending machines, this could just be an expensive toy that flashes briefly in the pan before ending up in our “Where are they now?” file. But, if some day in the near future, you find yourself in an airport or a break room walking up to a machine and saying “Diet Coke, twist of lemon, cold” or the equivalent for whatever it is you drink, just remember: you heard it here first…