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.
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:
