Coca-Cola FREESTYLE Episode 2: The Present of Bad Soda

[Marcel Birgelen]

Continued from the old forum...

It took them a few years, but those FREESTYLE machines made their inroads into Europe. It looks like Burger King is deploying them into all new franchises. Five Guys, who is massively expanding in mainland Europe, even despite the pandemic is deploying them into every one of their locations.

Due to lack of alternatives I ended up at a Burger King drive-in lately, this location used to have "normal Coke" in the past, as in like seven or so years ago. When I took a sip of my coke I thought something had gone bad. Maybe they served me "Light" (the European version of Diet) or "Zero"? Even though it really tasted like none of those. So I went back to complain. They gave me another one, which they claimed, came from another machine. The result was the same. It's not even that the stuff didn't taste like Coke, the stuff just tasted awful, like someone had mixed some molten plastic into it...

As a rare exception, they let me in through the side door (the location was still take-out only), just to show me that there was nothing odd with the machine. To my "surprise", I realized that those machines were those dreaded FREESTYLE machines, to which they recently had switched.

I still can't believe why Coca Cola can commit to shipping such a product and still put their brand on it. It tastes nothing like Coke, it doesn't even taste like a Cola. Most rip-off cola products you can buy at the local grocery store do a better job in imitating Coca Cola than this "genuine" Coca Cola product does...

[Sean McKinnon]

I hate the freestyle machines. In my opinion they have sacrificed quantity (choices) over quality. I would be very surprised if McDonalds were to ever adopt them as they take their coca-cola very seriously!

[Randy Stankey]

It’s not about the product. It’s about marketing and data gathering.

Those machines don’t just dispense soda pop. They also gather information about who drinks what, when and where they drink it.

Every time you touch one of those machines they record what you do and that data is sent back to the Mothership and used by the company for data mining.

[Marcel Birgelen]

As long as the machines don't scan my fingerprint and want a urine sample before dispensing me a drink, I'm actually fine with them acquiring statistics about what people want to drink. What they fail to provide though is the: "I don't want any of these, because they all stink"-button...

I also do like the idea of being able to spike my drink with some "addons", like "lime", "cherry" or "stewed puke"... but why the hell does the "basic beverage" taste like shit? Why not use the same syrup all the other Coca Cola soda fountains use? If you then want to give me the option to spike it with "maplewood smoked bacon", fine. But don't sell me some liquefied dog-shit infused with Kevlar as Coca Cola...

[Randy Stankey]

My point is that it’s not about the product anymore.

It’s all about the data mining and how to spin that information into some new marketing idea.

[Mark Ogden]

Continued from the old forum...

Due to lack of alternatives I ended up at a Burger King drive-in lately, this location used to have "normal Coke" in the past, as in like seven or so years ago. When I took a sip of my coke I thought something had gone bad. Maybe they served me "Light" (the European version of Diet) or "Zero"? Even though it really tasted like none of those. So I went back to complain. They gave me another one, which they claimed, came from another machine. The result was the same. It's not even that the stuff didn't taste like Coke, the stuff just tasted awful, like someone had mixed some molten plastic into it...

Based on what you have described, it sounds a lot like you were served expired product. Coke syrup, even in the bag-in-the-box, can only go about three or four months after its best by date before a noticeable shift in the taste sets in. It's even shorter if it has been exposed to heat. Diet Coke falls apart even faster, it takes on a kind of sour citrus taste, sort of what I imagine drinking lemon-scented Mr.Clean would taste like.

Next time, make them show you the dates on the boxes.

[Marcel Birgelen]

The Freestyle machines use some kind of "cartridge system", which essentially is a bag-in-box system, but inside a plastic sleeve. You have bigger cartridges for the "base drink" and then you have a whole array of smaller cartridges for the flavors. They're much smaller than the traditional bag-in-box style packages for your classic soda fountain setup.

They didn't pull the cartridges out but showed me a stack of those they had already lying around as a replacement. The one I took from the top, which was a Coke Zero one, had an expiry date of somewhere in august, so I guess the rest would be in the same ballpark.

Actually, they weren't too fond of the machines themselves, especially not for drive-thru operations, as the machines touch interface is slow, you need to keep to press the button all the way to fill the drinks, opposed to their old machine, that would do an initial pour and then you just needed to level off. The ice dispenser constantly needs refilling and the cartridges, being much smaller than their traditional bag-in-box counterparts, run on empty much faster. Also, they don't advertise any of the different taste-options at the drive-thru, as that would only further slow-down operations.

My point is that it’s not about the product anymore.

It’s all about the data mining and how to spin that information into some new marketing idea.

Which is... well... a whole new level of corporate retardation?

Last time I checked, the Coca Cola Company was one of the largest product companies in the world. So, they think they're Google or Facebook now? How does that even make sense if those machines can't link me to some "personal profile"? Much of their value is based on strong advertisement, but to me it always seemed that many people were very dedicated to the specific taste of their products. While there are plenty of people around that don't mind if they're drinking Coke, Pepsi or Sam's Choice, many people still do. It seems like they've forgotten all about their own home-made classic little corporate disaster called New Coke...

[Frank Cox]

New Coke? I can beat that!

Here is the worst thing ever. These showed up in corner stores in the early 1970's, and disappeared a few months later.

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Yes, that's actual fruit flavoured potato chips!

They were so awful and such a dismal failure that, even though they were only a available for a few short months people around my age still remembers them.

"Remember fruit flavoured potato chips?"
"Those things? They were awful!"

It really makes you wonder how some of that stuff gets green-lighted. Obviously nobody in the decision making tree actually tried one before they manufactured the first million...

[Randy Stankey]

Data mining does not necessarily require a transaction to be linked with a user's identity.

All they need to know is time, date, location and what combination of ingredients was dispensed. I suppose that the machine could keep track of how long a visitor stood in front of the machine, pressing buttons, as well. That is all really valuable data for a company because it helps them develop new flavors. If a large percentage of customers chose Coke with orange and vanilla flavor added, the company might release a product nationwide. However, if they found out that the bulk of those customers lived in Pennsylvania, they might scale back such a product rollout to just that area until they had a chance to see whether a full scale rollout would be worth it.

Furthermore... Yes, those machines can and do link product choices to individual users. They have Bluetooth capability and they have QR scanners.
If a user downloads the app for their phone, they can interact with the machine remotely and, by using the QR scanner, create and dispense whatever flavor combination they want.
As a bonus, all of the information on the customer's phone is (potentially) available for Coca-Cola's marketing department to peruse at their leisure.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I personally don't have any real problems with all kinds of data-mining, as long as they keep my identity out of it. If this is how they learn that people in Pennsylvania like orange-flavored coke and decide to give it a run in their grocery stores, I'd say... great. People like the stuff, why not sell it to them. If they use those statistics to make a better product, like a better user interface for those machines, because people spend too much time tinkering around if they want vanilla-lime or just vanilla, then I guess that's perfectly fine. The problem arises as soon as you start using me personally as your mining subject and start selling this data to everybody. The fun stops for me, if I start getting strawberry-flavored Sprite adds in my browser and YouTube videos, because I once though that would be an acceptable combination.

I guess the Bluetooth capability of those machines can make for some "fun" interactions while waiting in line. Suddenly, the dude behind you decides what you drink today.

Still, they lost me as a customer. If I see one of those machines in use, I'm not getting any Coca Cola products or I may just decide to take my business elsewhere, where they still sell Coke that actually tastes like the stuff they're known for. And as such, for me, it's a failed experiment. If their plain Coke would just taste like Coke, I would continue to use those things, I may even try adding some flavors, if they're any good. But as of now, it's like they don't care about their end-product.

I guess it went wrong, because they needed to get more capacity out of their much smaller "cartridges". The mixing ratio between water and their base-syrup probably is different than with their usual BIB-style containers. So, they probably also needed to boost the flavors in their syrup and maybe they upped the amount of essential oils in the mix or put some other nasty stuff in it to try to compensate for it...

New Coke? I can beat that!

Here is the worst thing ever. These showed up in corner stores in the early 1970's, and disappeared a few months later.

Yes, that's actual fruit flavoured potato chips!

They were so awful and such a dismal failure that, even though they were only a available for a few short months people around my age still remembers them.

"Remember fruit flavoured potato chips?"
"Those things? They were awful!"

It really makes you wonder how some of that stuff gets green-lighted. Obviously nobody in the decision making tree actually tried one before they manufactured the first million...

Yeah, fruit-flavored potato chips really sounds awful and probably tastes almost equally bad as it sounds... Still, imagine you never had the distinctive pleasure of trying one of those, like me, wouldn't you at least just want to try at least one of each? At best, it would confirm the ultimate awfulness or maybe it wasn't actually as bad as you imagined.

It's nothing new for a company to test new kinds of flavors, some of them, I'd consider to be "shock flavors". I guess the manufacturers simply hope to revive interest into their brand by marketing something so outrageous, a lot of people will be motivated to buy this stuff at least once, to try how it actually tastes... Right now, around here, it seems to be hipster to sell an "ultra-hot" version of everything. I don't know if this is a viable business model, but that's the only way I can explain bacon-flavored milkshake and fish-flavored ice cream.

But this Freestyle thing is really something else IMHO. This is more like if Hostess would make a Twinkie machine that now can fill your Twinkie with a gazillion different flavors and it lets you mix them at will. Want a lemon-cherry flavored filling? Or what about some bacon-raspberry? I have no problem with this, as long as I can still have a "vanilla" Twinkie and as long as this just tastes like the real thing and not like someone put tuna salad into it instead...

[Randy Stankey]

I'm ambivalent about data mining. Like you say, I'm kinda-sorta okay with it as long as it doesn't single out individual people.

My problem is about "empty marketing" where advertising and brand identification become more important than the product being sold.

Personally, I don't care whether they put pictures of polar bears or Santa on Coke cans during the holiday. I don't give a flying frog leap whose name is printed on a bottle.
However, the Coca-Cola Company thinks that those things increase sales by up to 2%. You might not think that's a whole lot but for a corporation that grossed over $30 billion last year, that measly 2% adds up to more than $600 million.

Personally, I don't give a flying frog leap what's printed on the outside of a container of brown, fizzy sugar water as long as I get what I paid for.

If the Coca-Cola Company thinks they can use those Freestyle machines to put marketing spin on drinks that taste like lemon scented furniture polish, I'll nope-out of that game.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Yeah, we all know that many greedy corporations like to slap some brand on some random stuff for some short-term gains, thereby destroying long-term value of something that others built over decades. But it was The Coca-Cola Company itself that wrote the book about it. The New Coke debacle is a textbook example of how short-term corporate greed, panic and abuse of well-established brands can result in grand-scale economic destruction.

Those Freestyle contraptions have been around for a while now. Maybe when those things were still in prototype stage, the "off taste" was somehow excusable, but they're pushing this product as one of their prime concepts for hospitality and catering industry. If this is the future of Coke, I'm switching to something that's definitely not Coke.

[Leo Enticknap]

The ice dispenser constantly needs refilling...

This thing can't even make its own ice?! Even the Samsung fridge from Home Depot sitting in my kitchen can do that!

[Marcel Birgelen]

There seem to be different models and I'm just quoting the employee, but no, this model, which seems to be the most recent one, cannot make its own ice. Yeah, many modern fridges are able to make ice, both cubed and crushed, but I guess you need a serious ice-maker for a soda-machine fit for a fast-food operations. Then again, I doubt those machines are really suitable for drive-thru or behind-the-counter operations in general. The whole idea is that those things operate on a self-serve basis and therefore take the load of filling soda drinks off of the employees. In return, you get machines that require attention every so many minutes, because a cartridge or the ice has run empty... or simply because the thing has become an unhygienic mess. Maybe, COVID-19 is the downfall for those things after all.

[Terry Monohan]

Does Pepsi® have these type of self serve machines or just Coke® In cinemas?

Our brand new San Francisco Cineworld Regal Stonestown Galleria 12 Theatre opens in a few weeks with Pepsi®. Hope they pore the old way with a good mix.

Many movie people I have seen just bring their own old saved Coke® medium cups and fill with ice or a beverage for free. Seems to work ok in some machines. Lost drink cand counter sales.

Soon they will bring back the old 1950's warm pre popped popcorn machines in the lobby along with candy dispensers you put money into and there will no one behind the refreshment counter to help you.

Big USA cinema companies have already cut back on the help starting in the boxoffice ticket area and concession counters.

In the future you may even go to a cinema and find no one working at all, everything will be on auto mode. Good luck on finding a live manager.