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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cana

Sold! Mystery Company Acquires Assets of Beverage Printing Startup Cana

Perusing the website of the Production Board earlier this week, I noticed the company that gave birth to the Cana beverage printer listed the business as “sold.”

Interesting, but not surprising. Cana, which ran into trouble trying to raise funding to build out its hardware and consumables production line, created quite a buzz the past couple of years and had filed for a bunch of IP before closing its doors this spring, so the chance to pick up the assets for a song could be a potentially intriguing prospect for a big CPG or tech brand.

When I reached out to the Production Board, they confirmed the sale but said it’s up to the acquiring company to reveal the destination of Cana. If one were to speculate, it’s easy to imagine any number of acquirers, ranging from Cola-Cola looking to make a next-gen countertop version of the Freestyle to a Keurig/Dr. Pepper turning the Cana cartridge into a money-printing consumable platform for the next decade.

Either way, we’re going to have to wait and see. If you do happen to know where Cana ended up and want to have a chat, please drop us a line.

Ninja’s Thirsti Drink Machine Shows Why It Went Public While Other Countertop Brands Go Out of Business

When I first got the email this morning from the Ninja PR rep, I got excited and thought maybe the company had gone and created a drink replicator similar to the one from Cana.

“SharkNinja’s First Hydration System, Ninja Thirsti, Allows Users to Create Thousands of Drinks at the Touch of a Button,” the press release declared triumphantly.

Ok, Ninja, you’ve got my attention.

Reading further, it became clear that the new Thirsti machine isn’t going to create any drink – coffee, tea, juice, beer, wine – at the push of a button. Instead, we have a machine taking on the Sodastreams and Philips of the world with a new home fizzy drink maker, only with a couple of interesting twists, including the ability to mix two flavors at once and vary the level of carbonation and flavor intensity. The new Thirsti will sell for $179 and will soon be available at major retailers like Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon.

The product isn’t a bad one – in fact, it looks like an improvement on what you can get from others in the category – it just isn’t a make-anything personalized drink machine like the Cana. But, unlike the Cana, the Thirsti will ship and be available at a competitive price point (the Cana was going to sell for $900).

In other words, the product was made for today, not the future, with a slightly different twist on what’s out on the market. And as I write those words, I may have just summarized SharkNinja’s guiding North Star principle because it seems the company does it repeatedly.

They did it when they offered up their Creami countertop ice cream and smoothie maker in 2021, which the NY Times compared to a professional machine in the Pacjojet in its ability to whip frozen treats in a similar fashion as a professional machine in the Pacojet (though with a few red flags).

They did it again when they entered the BBQ/smoker space, creating an interesting-looking outdoor grill and smoker, about which Home & Garden had to say the following: “Many grills have multiple cooking functions, but there isn’t anything on the market quite like the Ninja Woodfire Outdoor Grill. Not only does it grill, but it can roast, bake, air crisp, dehydrate, broil, and best of all – smoke meats and vegetables to perfection.”

And we can’t forget how the company was one of the first to offer a combination air fryer and pressure cooker in 2018, a year before Instant Pot got around to offering the product combo.

And it’s these products that are, in a sense, why Ninja is going public while others are puttering along with lesser market share and, in some cases, going out of business.

If you’d asked anyone back in 2019 who would go public in 2023, most would have pointed to Instant Pot, not SharkNinja. But today, it’s SharkNinja that is growing revenue (it had $3.76 billion in the 12 months ending in March) while Instant Brands is reorganizing its business under chapter 11 and laying off employees.

The spin out comes six years after SharkNinja was acquired by Chinese small appliance entrepreneur (and Joyoung founder) Wang Xuning, who used private equity financing to do the deal and create a new company in JS Global Products with SharkNinja at the center. Now, years later and with hundreds of patents to its name, SharkNinja has plans to go public.

The countertop appliance business is a very tough one to compete in. Still, Ninja has thrived due to its willingness to create new mashup concepts for products, often with interesting design choices, all packaged around unique and memorable brand names for each line. This contrasted with companies like Instant Brands, which would at times create products that seemed derivative of its initial ideas, or like Gourmia and other copycat brands, whose knockoff products didn’t have the same quality feel or brand line cohesiveness.

So while Ninja hasn’t offered a drink replicator, give them time. They’ve shown they can surprise us, and maybe someday, that will be with something straight out of the pages of science fiction.

The Spoon Weekly: Heinz Freestyles Condiments, Cana Shuts Down

Cana Shuts Down

Cana, the company which was building an appliance that they claimed could create and customize virtually any beverage, shut down last week, The Spoon has learned.

According to numerous Linkedin posts from previous employees, the company could not secure funding and laid off all of its employees last week. Cana, which had raised $30 million in January last year, promised to have the product ready to ship sometime this year. But despite having a working prototype and brand partners in place, Cana could not raise the “funding necessary to build a production line for manufacturing and shipping devices.”

The news comes just two months after the company brought on none other than Sir Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame to be a brand ambassador, a hail mary move that didn’t work out.

Like many startups nowadays, Cana found the drastically reshaped funding environment just too difficult to survive. Consumer hardware startups have had a particularly tough time in recent years, and Cana’s climb was made even more difficult given the task of developing and building a consumables production infrastructure.

The Cana vision of a make-anything drink machine always seemed a bit too good to be true, so it’s a bummer we’ll never see if they could have made it work if they had gotten more funding.

Read post.

Attention Automated Food Retail Startups: Take Your Innovation to the Big Apple! (Sponsor)

The MTA is seeking a qualified vending operator to provide services consisting of furnishing, installing, stocking, maintaining, managing, and operating vending machines at locations within various New York City Transit (“NYCT”) stations!

Does your platform have what it takes? Learn more here about submitting a proposal for this opportunity today!

Heinz Introduces REMIX, a Coca-Cola Freestyle for Condiments

We weren’t expecting Heinz to show up with a cool new product this week, but a big company surprises you every now and then. 

No, it’s not MayoChup or Wasabioli, but the Heinz REMIX, a vending-machine-sized sauce dispenser that lets customers create personalized sauce mixes.

The new machine, which the company claims to have developed from concept in just six months, can create up to 200 sauce combinations from a base of sauces that includes ketchup, ranch, Heinz 57 Sauce, and BBQ Sauce. From there, the customers can mix in what the company calls “enhancers, ” including jalapeño, smoky chipotle, buffalo, and mango at varying intensities (low, medium, high).

The product, which is part of the company’s “Away From Home” (AFH) division, will debut later this month at National Restaurant Show.

The product is reminiscent of the Coca-Cola Freestyle, which lets customers create weird combinations of sodas to their heart’s content. However, unlike the Freestyle, it’s unclear how many restaurants are willing to cede floor space to a giant condiment mixer. Sodas are something customers actually pay for, and I’d gone to places just so I could use the Freestyle. So while the REMIX might be a draw for condiment-conscious consumers, restaurants will need to be sure the extra cost of having a REMIX adds enough to the bottom line in recurring or new customers to make it worth it.

But who knows, maybe all those RanchUp or Mango 57 nerds out have been waiting for the moment when they can finally express themselves.

Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Anat Natan, CEO and Cofounder of Anina

The Spoon’s Joy Chen recently caught up with Anat Natan, the co-founder and CEO of Anina. Anina is an Israeli startup that takes imperfect food and transforms it into ready-made meals in pods. Food waste has significant economic and environmental implications, and it is estimated that the greenhouse gas emissions from food contribute to 7% of the overall greenhouse gasses emitted globally. They talked about the technology that powers Anina, operating in markets outside of Israel, and what she believes sets Israeli founders apart. 

J: Talk to me about the technology behind Anina. 

A: We create these laminates, these vegetable sheets, and we try to incorporate as much food waste as possible. The laminate is strong but flexible. We try to take the ugly produce, and we try to incorporate all this food waste in our production process because we care about all the factors of the produce outside of how it looks. A third of the produce in the US goes to waste due to aesthetic reasons. I think there’s a catch-22. As consumers, we want to be more and more sustainable, consume more sustainable brands, and support sustainable production. But on the other hand, we become, as consumers, more concerned about what’s perfect. 

After we create these laminates, we mold them, we fill them, and we close them. Our technology is protected IP, and this IP contains the process from fresh produce to the pod, including the laminate. We’re registering it in the US, the EU, Israel, and Singapore. 

J: Did you choose those markets because those will be your first entry points? 

A: Our go-to market is divided into two approaches. With the US, our brand will have partners to get to the market efficiently and reach customers in the right and creative way. With the rest of the world, we are going to use a B2B approach, which is a joint venture. We bring to the table what we know how to do, which is the production process and R&D. And everybody does what they know how to do best. The partners know the market, the consumers, and the supply chain. We start by creating pilots, and we’re going to conduct pilots in Israel, Spain, Andorra, and Singapore to understand the right way to approach the market. And after that, we will create a long-term collaboration with them. 

J: What type of consumer testing have you done so far? 

A: So much. We have conducted external research in Israel, Spain, in Italy (with Barilla) and very in-depth design thinking research. In the US, we have done a market analysis that organizes qualitative, quantitative, demographics, and surveys. Every time we ask the question, do you understand what it is? Do you know how to use it? We give the product to people to try at home and then answer surveys. Anina was established in June 2020, and I’ve been conducting research since August 2020 because I believe that innovation needs to go hand in hand with understanding how to approach the consumer. Obviously, they cannot imagine what they don’t have in front of them. But you have to evaluate what they think to make sure that you don’t bring an alien to them eventually. 

Read our full interview with Anat here. 

Restaurant Tech

Two Years After Buying Spyce, Sweetgreen Launches Infinite Kitchen Robotic Restaurant

Last week, Sweetgreen opened the company’s first robotic restaurant in Naperville, Ill, a suburb of Chicago.

The new automated restaurant, which the company calls Infinite Kitchen, comes almost two years after the company acquired Spyce Kitchen, a startup building automated robotic makelines.

The Infinite Kitchen name is not new; Spyce first used the name when it launched its second-generation robotic kitchen platform in November 2020 and, like the new Sweetgreen Infinite Kitchen, the system was visually reminiscent of the Creator burger makeline. The system’s conveyor belt runs under ingredient dispensers that drop customized mixes of fresh ingredients into bowls. 

In the video and the press release, Sweetgreen takes pains to make clear that while it sees automation as a way to add efficiency to operations and enhance the customer experience, they are not doing away with humans as part of the Sweetgreen experience.

“Every meal begins with human hands,” says the video’s narrator, “from our local farmers to our team members, all there to guide you through the process.”

With the Infinite Kitchen, Sweetgreen has also rethought the customer process flow, integrating digital touchpoints (including self-service kiosks similar to those from Spyce).

You can read about the launch of Sweetgreen’s Infinite Kitchen here.

CRISPR

Pairwise Rolls Out First CRISPR-Edited Produce to U.S. Restaurants

Pairwise, a startup specializing in developing gene-edited produce, today announced the launch of its first product, a CRISPR-developed mustard green. The new product, the Conscious Greens Purple Power Baby Greens Blend, will launch into the restaurant/food service channel in partnership with the food service specialist Performance Food Group.

The launch of gene-edited produce by Pairwise comes almost three years after the company got the sign-off from the USDA for its gene-edited mustard green. Mustard greens aren’t usually found on menus due to their pungent smell and bitter taste, but with changes engineered by CRISPR, Pairwise hopes to create a nutritious alternative to kale and Brussels sprouts that also tastes good.

While the Conscious Foods blend with Pairwise’s mustard greens will be the first publicly announced CRISPR-edited produce available in the US market, the product follows the launch of gene-edited tomatoes in Japan in late 2021. That product was produced by Sanatech Seed, which used CRISPR to increase the amount of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in the tomatoes, a supplement that researchers claim can reduce blood pressure and improve moods.

The release of the Sanatech Seed tomatoes came roughly the same time gene-edited fish became commercially available in Japan. In late 2021, Kyoto-based Regional Fish Co., Ltd. started selling genome-edited “Madai” red sea bream and “22-seiki fugu” tiger puffer fish which were edited to grow bigger.

Read the full story here on The Spoon.

Vertical Farming

Plenty’s New Vertical Farm To Produce 4.5M Pounds of Leafy Greens From a Single City Block

Today indoor ag startup Plenty announced what it claims is the world’s most advanced vertical farm. Located in Compton, California, the company says the farm is designed to yield up to 4.5 million pounds of leafy greens annually, occupying just a city block’s worth of space.

Using a highly-automated robotic system in what the company describes as a 3D vertical design, Plenty claims its patented technology will yield up to 350 times that of a conventional farm. Unlike most other vertical farms that grow produce on flat planes that mimic the field, Plenty’s 3D system uses vertical towers nearly two stories high. Plenty believes that their design architecture makes indoor farming more efficient by allowing them to grow more produce in less space. The company also uses robotics in nearly every step of the process, from planting to harvest

“After investing nearly a decade into research and development, ​​Plenty has cracked the code on a scalable platform for indoor farming,” said Plenty CEO Arama Kukutai. “With Plenty’s first commercial farm, we’re proving that our uniquely vertical indoor farms can deliver a reliable, year-round supply of fresh produce with positive unit economics.”

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Alt Protein

New Study Claims Cultivated Meat’s Current Path Is Significantly Worse for Environment Than Beef

A new life-cycle analysis by researchers at UC Davis has concluded that the current path of the cultivated meat industry’s commercialization process is potentially orders of magnitude worse for the environment than beef produced through animal agriculture, producing anywhere from 4 to 25 times more CO2 than traditionally produced beef.

The analysis, which at this point has not been peer-reviewed, stands in stark contrast to previous life cycle analysis (LCA) studies that have concluded the environmental impact of cell-cultivated meat – which the study calls “animal cell-based meat” or ACBM – is significantly less than that of traditionally produced beef. However, according to the new research, the problem with previous LCAs is that they do not accurately represent the environmental impact of the current technologies being used in the assumption sets for forecasts within the techno-economic models.

In particular, the study (which was first written about in IFL Science) says the significant environmental impact associated with the purification required of growth medium has not been fully accounted for in previous studies. According to the UC Davis researchers, these previous studies had “high levels of uncertainty in their results and a lack of accounting” for what they believe is the necessary endotoxin removal required for growth media. Accounting for the required purification is essential say the study’s authors, and they believe that the fossil fuel needed for purified growth medium components using the current anticipated commercialization process is anywhere between 3 and 17 times that of the reported “high” scenario for that of traditional boneless beef production.

While the researchers state their study is more accurate than previous LCAs that didn’t accurately model the cost of the production of the purified growth medium, they go on to say that is because the cost built into these techno-economic models is based on current systems being developed for the near-term commercialization of ACBM. They say that the industry would be better off as a whole if some of the key issues were solved before the industry focused on commercial scaling, such as developing a more “environmentally friendly method for endotoxin removal” or “the development of a technological innovation that allows for the use of an inexpensive animal cell growth media produced from agricultural by-products.”.

Read the full story at The Spoon

Cana, The Startup Building a Make-Any-Drink Beverage Printer, Shuts Down

Cana, the company which was building an appliance that they claimed could create and customize virtually any beverage, shut down last week, The Spoon has learned.

According to numerous Linkedin posts from previous employees, the company could not secure funding and laid off all of its employees last week. Cana, which had raised $30 million in January last year, promised to have the product ready to ship sometime this year. But despite having a working prototype and brand partners in place, Cana could not raise the “funding necessary to build a production line for manufacturing and shipping devices.”

The news comes just two months after the company brought on none other than Sir Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame to be a brand ambassador, a hail mary move that didn’t work out.

Like many startups nowadays, Cana found the drastically reshaped funding environment just too difficult to survive. Consumer hardware startups have had a particularly tough time in recent years, and Cana’s climb was made even more difficult given the task of developing and building a consumables production infrastructure.

The Cana vision of a make-anything drink machine always seemed a bit too good to be true, so it’s a bummer we’ll never see if they could have made it work if they had gotten more funding.

The Spoon Weekly: Beverage Printing Becomes a Trend & The Breadbot Rises After CES Success

We Now Can Officially Call Beverage “Printing” a Trend

While folks often wait to have three of a thing before declaring a trend, I’m gonna go ahead and call it in the case of beverage printing after two. 

And as of last month, we officially had our second startup making a home beverage “printer”, only unlike the Cana which is a Swiss Army Knife make beverage machine, the One Tap, which makes beer instantly by mixing in different flavor and aroma inputs. The printer’s “cartridges” essentially look like small vials, each containing different liquids that can dial up or down on the hoppiness, sweetness and more. 

The One Tap is made by a startup out of Belgium called Bar.on. The company, which raised €.1.8 million last fall, says the One Tap can produce a variety of beer styles such as blond, brown, IPA, and tripel, as well as make high, low, or even no-alcohol beer.

Like the Cana, the company’s pitch centers around sustainability, talking up the potential impact that making drinks at home will have as compared to the carbon-heavy approach of printing liquids in cans and bottles around the country to grocery stores, restaurants, and bars. 

The jury’s still out on how much that will resonate, as well as how the beer will actually taste. The company claims the early recipes have performed well in blind taste tests, but for now, we’ll have to take their word for it as the company still needs to raise more capital before it can build and ship its machines to customers. 

You can read my writeup of the One Tap here. For those interested in going deeper into 3D food printing, we have the full video from last week’s 3D food printing deep dive under our Spoon Plus subscription program. 

Sponsor: Attention Automated Food Retail Startups: Take Your Innovation to the Big Apple!

The MTA is seeking a qualified vending operator to provide services consisting of furnishing, installing, stocking, maintaining, managing, and operating vending machines at locations within various New York City Transit (“NYCT”) stations!

Does your platform have what it takes? Learn more here about submitting a proposal for this opportunity today!

Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Amir Zaidman, The Kitchen

Last month, The Spoon’s Joy Chen visited the Kitchen Hub at their office in Ashdod, Israel and sat down with Amir Zaidman, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of the Kitchen. Prior to co-founding the Kitchen, he spent 10-14 years in business development in medical technology working on both the startup and investing sides. 

They chatted about what the Kitchen does, what sets Israeli startup founders apart, what the ecosystem needs, how precision fermentation is the new software, and what it’ll be like for Israeli customers to try the first cultivated meat product. 

J: Let’s talk about what the Kitchen is and what it does. 

A: First and foremost, we have capital we invest in startups like a seed or pre-seed stage venture capital. We have more money than a typical seed stage venture capital would invest because we are also getting money from the government to invest in those startups. While a typical seed stage fund would not invest $200-0.5M, we can invest closer to $1M in a company. Those companies become portfolio companies and they have access to the facility but it’s also the very close support that the team in the Kitchen is giving the teams in the companies. At least for the first 2-3 years after we invest in them, it’s a very intense relationship. 

J: Would you say the Kitchen is like a venture studio? 

A: Not exactly. For us, venture studio is when we start with a blank page. Then we brainstorm and figure out what we want to do based on needs from the industry, global trends, and where the industry is going. We start scouting for the enabling technologies, science, intellectual property that might be relevant for the project. When we find that, we go into negotiations with universities or research institutes and we go into a licensing agreement to own the license for that technology. Then we go recruit the team and give them equity into the new company that we created that holds the license for the technology. The venture studio model for us is starting from nothing and bringing all of those building blocks together. 

The third thing the Kitchen does is activity in the foodtech community in Israel. 

To reach our full interview with Amir Zaidman, head over to The Spoon. 

Food Robots

Four Years After CES, Breadbot’s Robotic Breadmaker is Dishing Out Loaves at Grocery Stores

For robot startups seeking to make a splash at CES, there are a few options: holding a large press conference, making it weird and creepy, or serving cocktails. However, one method stands out above the rest for drawing in crowds: wafting the aroma of freshly baked bread (aka ‘the Subway method‘).

That’s what the folks behind the Wilkinson Baking Company did back in 2019, and the end result was their robot, the Breadbot, became a sensation that year at the world’s largest tech event. The smell of fresh bread pulled in journalists, tech nerds, and passersby like a tractor beam, garnering the type of press that big budget brands like Samsung would envy.

The small Eastern Washington-based company, co-founded by brothers Randall and Ron Wilkinson, has been working diligently to bring their product to market since then. Their goal was to transition from a working prototype to a production-ready machine suitable for grocery stores.

As part of the transition, the company also looked to find a new CEO. The Wilkinson brothers, both in their late sixties, wanted a CEO that could take the early-stage startup from a small LLC with a big idea to one that was mature enough to raise funding and bring the first product to market. Paul Rhynard, a former strategy consultant for McKinsey who also had experience raising capital as Chief Strategy Officer for Russell Investments, stepped in for Randall in April of last year and has since helped raise a seed round of $3 million last summer to fund the build-out of the company’s first production run of robots.

To read the full story on how the Breadbot is progressing, head on over to The Spoon.

Grocery

Walmart Gains Share in Online Grocery as Shoppers Look for Ways to Combat Inflation

While online grocery shopping continued to grow last year, where people shopped shifted significantly according to a new report from grocery researcher Brick Meets Click.

The new report, which details the egrocery performance for different retail formats, said Walmart was the big winner in 2022 as more and more customers looked for ways to save a buck. According to the report, which broke down the four major formats as supermarkets, Walmart, Target, and Hard Discount (i.e. Aldi and Lidl), Walmart saw its share of online grocery shoppers grow in both low-income and high-income households.

According to Brick Meets Click, households making less than $50 thousand per year were 25% more likely to shop at Walmart than a supermarket, and Walmart’s total share of online grocery in this household category grew by 2.1% vs. a contraction of 1.5% for supermarket’s share. On the high end of the spectrum, Walmart gained ground in households making over $200 thousand annually, expanding its reach into this segment by 2.1%. In contrast, supermarkets saw their reach shrink by 1.2% in 2022 vs. the previous year.

The reason for the shift towards Walmart for both segments was persistent inflation. Lower-income households were driven by what the researcher terms “flight to value,” where they buy products priced via an “everyday low price” pricing model employed at Walmart and hard discounters such as Aldi. And while high-end income households are three times more likely to shop online at a supermarket, the format lost share to Walmart in 2022 as upper-income earners also looked for ways to save on groceries.

Read the full story here on The Spoon.

The Consumer Kitchen

Spoiled Opportunities: How Tupperware Could Have Reinvented Itself Before It Was Too Late

In recent weeks, news reports about the struggles of the housewares brand Tupperware have surfaced.

It’s unfortunate to see such a storied brand on the brink of bankruptcy, but it raises the question: was this avoidable? Could Tupperware have saved itself by embracing new ideas to modernize its brand and products?

We’ll never know for certain, but a household name like Tupperware might have had a chance if it had explored new products and business models a little sooner. Here are a few ideas of how the company could have reinvented itself:

DTC Housewares Rollup

Tupperware could have transitioned to a direct-to-consumer (DTC) model sooner, either natively or through acquisition. Although Tupperware products are available for purchase on its website, the company still largely relies on its direct sales model, which is based on the party plan concept. While some companies can still make this model work (like Thermomix), the Tupperware Party is a relic of the past that does not resonate with modern consumers.

One approach the company could have considered is a brand rollup strategy, similar to what we have seen from Pattern Brands. Pattern has been gradually acquiring successful DTC brands like GIR, Yield, Poketo, and Onsen. Each brand already had its own loyal following, and Pattern was able to achieve operational scale by consolidating back-office, marketing, and distribution. Tupperware could have also considered larger deals with successful social media-driven brands like Caraway.

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Future of Retail

Starbucks Trialing Amazon’s Palm Payment System in the Seattle Market

Starbucks is trialing Amazon’s biometric payment system, Amazon One, in the Seattle market. The system, which allows customers to pay in-store with the scan of a palm, was spotted in a Starbucks north of the company’s Seattle headquarters in Edmonds, Washington.

To sign up to use the system, users can pre-enroll at the Amazon One website or inside Starbucks at the Amazon One kiosk. Since I didn’t already have an Amazon One account, I decided to sign up in the coffee shop. The kiosk prompted me to scan the barcode within the Starbucks app on my phone to identify my Starbucks account and recognize my form of payment. From there, it asked me to hover both my left and right palms above the scanner, one after the other. Once each palm was scanned, I was ready to go. It had taken all of about two minutes to sign up.

Since I was already there, I figured I’d try it out. I got in line and asked the barista for an iced tea. When asked for payment, I hovered my palm above the scanner until it recognized it, and that was that.

Read the full story at The Spoon

Cana Unveils Pricing for Molecular Beverage Printer, Gives a Peek Inside

Today Cana, a company building a countertop drink printer that makes nearly any type of beverage, announced pricing for the drink machine, beverage cartridges, and the estimated ship date for the product.

Called the Cana One, the company’s first countertop beverage printer will have a limited time price of $499 for the first 10 thousand orders, after which it will be priced at $799. Customers can reserve a Cana One at the lower price for $99 on the company’s website (the $99 will be applied to the purchase price).

The company will ship everything necessary to make a drink – the sweeteners, alcohol, and the molecular drink cartridges – to the customer’s home. When the Cana One auto-detects that cartridges are getting low, the company will automatically ship them to the customer’s home.

How much the Cana One user pays for ingredients largely depends on consumption. Customers will order drinks and pay anywhere from $0.29 to $2.99 per beverage. The more a customer consumes, the more they pay, and the faster Cana is shipping out replenishment to their doorstep.

Above Left: Current Cana Prototype. Above Right: Cana Design as Presented on Website

The company showed the Cana One off to CNET in advance of today’s announcement. Not surprisingly, the current prototype being shown to press doesn’t quite look (at least on the inside) like the design concept of the Cana One on the company’s website. As you can see above, the sugar and spirits cartridges in the conceptual design on the right are high-polish and are not transparent, as seen in the working prototype on the left. Cana did not show off the molecular ingredient cartridge during the reveal demo this week, but you can see what they suggest it will look like in the conceptual design on the right.

CNET editor Brian Cooley sampled five drinks from the machine – cold brew coffee, two blueberry coolers, a grapefruit sparkler, and a mimosa – all of which took on average about 30 seconds to make. According to Cooley, all the drinks were good but were not exact replicas of the original versions.

One interesting aspect highlighted in the company’s new hero reel on their website is an emphasis on creators. The company will feature recipes from creators on the Cana touchscreen. Since users can create their own recipes, featuring popular recipes from individuals makes sense. However, at this point, it’s unclear how recipes are discovered or how creators will be compensated for their unique mixes.

According to the announcement, the Cana One is expected to ship in early 2023, but with the following caveat: their current ship date is “based on current visibility into its supply chain.” That caveat probably is smart, given the current chaos in worldwide supply chains and the uncertainly brought on in recent weeks due to war in Ukraine.

You can watch the CNET video about the Cana One below:

Podcast: Building The Star Trek Drink Replicator With Cana’s Matt Mahar

This week, Cana came out of stealth and announced their “molecular beverage printer”, a device the company says will be able to create almost any beverage from the same 80 or so flavor compounds.

In our conversation we talk about the development of Cana, drink personalization, the business model, the future of beverages and much more.

I’m glad I had this conversation because I had so many questions which Matt addressed, including:

Will the Cana beverage printer cartridge include alcohol and sweeteners, etc?

One thing I wasn’t entirely clear on from the initial announcement was whether the Cana will make a complete beverage, including alcohol, sweeteners, etc. According to Matt, the answer is yes. The Cana will make complete beverages, no matter if it’s a glass of wine, beer or whatever, complete with alcohol, sweeteners, etc.

Will Cana unlock personalized beverage market?

That’s their plan. I will write more about this later, but it looks like Cana not only will allow you to make whatever unique beverage you want (chocolate peanut butter coffee beer anyone?), but it seems they are also thinking about possibly partnering with drink and culinary creators to unlock special recipe concepts.

Pricing?

They addressed this in their initial posts, but Matt shed additional light on it for me when he said they expect their drinks to be 50% cheaper than anything you get at retail. The discount will be even steeper compared to bar and restaurant pricing.

Matt discusses a lot more details and their plans for the future, so give it a listen! You can also find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

Cana Unveils Molecular Beverage Printer, a ‘Netflix for Drinks’ That Can Make Nearly Any Type of Beverage

In late 2018, food tech entrepreneur and investor Dave Friedberg got together with a few scientists for dinner and drinks and talked about a recent article he had come across. The article detailed a research study that suggested most any beverage is made up almost entirely of water, with only about one percent or so making up a drink’s unique flavor.

It wasn’t long before someone wondered aloud if it would be possible to create a machine that could synthesize nearly any drink.

“Why not just make the Star Trek Replicator and let people print any drink they want, when they want, right in their own home?”

That night the concept for the Cana, a ‘molecular drink printer’, was born.

The device, which one investor describes as a “Netflix for drinks”, uses a single cartridge filled with flavor compounds that Friedberg claims can make a nearly infinite number of drinks: “We know we can print an infinite number of beverages from a few core flavor compounds. We know we can do this across many existing beverage categories — juice, soda, hard seltzer, cocktails, wine, tea, coffee, and beer. Consumer taste testing panels score our printed beverages at the same or better taste levels as commercially available alternatives. Our hardware designs will print beverages quickly and accurately. Our pricing and the footprint of our hardware can yield significant savings and advantages for most households..”

The system is about the size of a toaster and utilizes what the company describes as novel microfluidic liquid dispense technology that combines Cana’s individual flavoring ingredients in a small form factor.

The company was incubated within Friedberg’s Production Board, his investment holding company for ag and food tech businesses. The Production Board has spent $30 million building Cana’s proprietary hardware platform and chemistry system.

In Friedberg’s blog post about Cana, he talks about how this new appliance is part of a larger trend towards decentralized manufacturing.

“Making a molecular beverage printer meant inventing a new kind of supply chain. Provided that the printers can use materials mostly sourced locally (i.e. tap water), we can replace old industrial supply chains with ones that are more nimble and more redundant, moving production to the point of consumption — the home. This new decentralized supply chain would use less energy and less carbon and cost less to operate, sourcing and shipping only the flavor compounds that make up the 1% of each beverage, rather than all the water and packaging.

This great decentralization in food is something I wrote about in 2019, when I talked about how intelligence in food production systems had begun to move towards the edge: In food retail, IT, robotics and digital powered micromanufacturing start to make its way to the different storefronts. In the restaurant space, we’re beginning to see automation and robotics to create hamburgers at the quality a Michelin star chef would make them, only without the chef. And at home, we’re witnessing the emergence of digital technologies used to grow food and prepare food and beverages beyond the capability of the home cook.

Friedberg and the Cana team have smartly positioned their system as a way to create beverages without all the plastic waste, claiming that the machine can print enough drinks to save a family from throwing about a hundred containers a month into the recycle or trash bin.

From here, the company plans to move the Cana into full production. While they aren’t yet releasing pricing, Cana says their machine and the ingredients will be more affordable than buying the drinks in containers. The company says they will have more information on pricing and the initial design in the coming months.

Stay tuned…

Image Credit: Cana Technology