In May 1886, the very first glass of Coca-Cola was poured from a soda fountain at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta.
Now 140 years later, the Atlanta beverage giant continues to reinvent how it dispenses drinks, brewing up that innovation in a hidden hometown lab.
Coca-Cola this week announced its next generation of beverage dispensing equipment, including a new interface for its Freestyle soda fountain, which features up to 200 customizable beverage choices from a touch screen. Many of the flavors are not available for sale in bottles or cans.
The company has also developed a mini version of the Freestyle machine that can sit on a bar top, and a mixology station that can craft specialty drinks like dirty sodas.
Credit: source
Credit: source
The innovations come as people crave customizable and increasingly complex drinks, fueled by social media trends, and as some restaurants grapple with how to make them efficiently amid high labor turnover.
“I think that desire to try something new, to explore, to take risks, to be surprised, isn’t really a new desire by consumers,” Ellis Chambers, director of Freestyle marketing and innovation for Coca-Cola, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an interview. “We’ve just gotten better and faster at supporting and enabling innovation.”
Coca-Cola’s hidden Atlanta lab
All the new equipment has a special connection to Atlanta. It was developed at Coca-Cola’s equipment lab that’s tucked away in the Northyards adaptive reuse project, not far from the company’s North Avenue headquarters.
There, in a hidden space where about 100 people work, roughly one-fourth of Coca-Cola’s patents have been developed, Gigy Philip, vice president of global equipment platforms, said on a recent tour.
The lab has operated for about 15 years, first focused on Freestyle, but more recently the company brought all its equipment development there.
“All of that innovation globally sits out of primarily this center,” Philip said.
Coca-Cola today is approaching the creation of new equipment differently than it has in the past, he said.
The company has developed modular components that can be arranged quickly in new formats to meet the needs of customers such as restaurant operators. Equipment that once took years to develop has sped up to several months, Philip said.
“Modularity treats equipment like Lego blocks,” he said. “We can go to market very, very rapidly.”
That’s important because Coca-Cola has about 70% of the U.S. soda-fountain market, said Duane Stanford, editor and publisher of trade publication Beverage Digest.
“They’ve got a huge user base,” Stanford said. “They live or die on whether they respond adequately to their food service customers.”
For example, McDonald’s, a longtime Coca-Cola customer, is phasing out self-serve fountain drink dispensers in the U.S., according to media reports — a shift that underscores the need for constant equipment evolution.
Credit: sour
Credit: sour
How Freestyle machines are evolving
On the recent Atlanta lab tour, a real-time digital counter on the wall showed about 66 billion drinks poured from Freestyle machines since their 2009 launch.
That’s roughly 11 million drinks a day in the U.S. and Canada, all poured with Freestyle machines connected to the internet, giving Coca-Cola expansive data on what drinks people like most. (Spoiler: Coca-Cola Classic is still No. 1, but drinks such as Barq’s, especially the zero sugar, cream soda flavor, are fast growing.)
“It’s actually the biggest live consumer taste test that’s going on anywhere on the globe,” Philip said of the Freestyle. “There is no other company that has this.”
Credit: sour
Credit: sour
Coca-Cola uses the information to develop new recipes, which it says it can do in just 90 days. For example, Fanta Crimson Sour Cherry was developed and launched for White Castle, and Sprite Loco Lime for Wingstop, both in less than three months.
“We have a huge foundation of ingredients that allow us a lot of runway for creativity,” Chambers said.
Freestyle helps Coca-Cola lift new beverages to the broader market. One example: Coca-Cola Orange Vanilla, which launched on the high-tech soda fountain and later moved to store shelves.
The latest Freestyle iteration includes a new user interface the company calls Equinox. It’s meant to amplify marketing from Coca-Cola and its food service customers, as well as increase personalization for guests.
For example, a Freestyle machine in a movie theater can promote Coca-Cola collaborations, such as a recent Diet Coke and Smartwater campaign with “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”
“It’s a way to create a more immersive experience that strengthens beverage as a category for our customers,” Chambers said.
The Equinox technology helps people better navigate to drinks they love and find new options to explore, such as limited releases, he added.
“This is a recruitment engine for the company,” he said of Freestyle. “For many guests, food service is where you have your first interaction with the Coca Cola Co. brands. It’s the first time you buy a Coke for yourself. … It’s important that we invest to make this experience exciting and demonstrate the portfolio.”
The Equinox technology will launch globally June 23, Coca-Cola said.
Credit: sou
Credit: sou
Coca-Cola has also developed a mini version of the Freestyle machine, small enough for a countertop. It’s meant to replace a soda fountain gun a bartender may typically use, aiming to provide more beverage options while freeing up staff.
“The bartender can basically select the drink and walk away while the drink is being poured to do other things,” Philip said.
The mini Freestyle is currently being tested at bars in London, with a rollout expected in the U.S. in the future.
A new mixology station
Coca-Cola has also created a mixology station in partnership with equipment company Micro Matic, which is now in testing.
This is Coca-Cola’s answer to an explosion of interest around craft and dirty sodas. It can take familiar beverages such as sodas, lemonades and coffee and layer in syrups and dairy products.
“It’s a very manual process at the moment, and with that, comes a lot of challenges,” Philip said, especially as restaurants deal with labor shortages or staff turnover.
Depending on how much they pump, workers might make the drink differently. The Micro Matic machine offers consistency and speed, Philip said. “You can press a button. It’ll dose exactly the same recipe over and over again to the absolute microliter,” he said.
That could give food service customers the ability to immediately pour complicated drinks, added Chambers.
“I could easily see that being applied across customers who want to get into dirty sodas, but they still need some operational efficiency,” Stanford of Beverage Digest said.
Coca-Cola plans to display all the new equipment at the National Restaurant Association’s food service show in Chicago this weekend.
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