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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

sparkling water

Pepsico Launches New SodaStream Professional Connected Sparkling Water System for Offices

Looking at the homepage for the new SodaStream Professional is like looking back in time. The page features pictures of the connected sparkling water device in the middle of an office as workers stride by, seemingly without a care in the world, sans facemasks.

I bring that up not to poke fun at Pepsico, but because the world that the company imagines for its new device, is far different from the one we currently live in.

Pepsico announced the new Sodastream Professional over the weekend. It’s a carbonated water dispenser and mobile app system that allows users to choose from different unsweetened flavors, levels of carbonation and track their hydration. It will also tell you how many plastic bottles you saved/avoided using.

Pepsisco didn’t provide many other details for the SodaStream Professional (like pricing), but it seems to be a follow up to a similar product the company announced a little more than a year ago. That device was smaller (countertop instead of freestanding), but had the same capabilities and was going into testing last summer.

In the press release, Pepsico said it was bringing “customizable beverages to workplaces, college campuses and airports.” But those are three locales that are either shut down or severely diminished, thanks to the global pandemic. There isn’t as much call for a sparkling water dispenser for the masses when there aren’t masses of people in any given location.

At least the SodaStream Professional appears to be contactless, with control via the mobile app.

The SodaStream Professional faces competition for your sparkling water dollars. Bevi makes similar fizzy/still flavored water dispenser for offices (and introduced its own touchless tech in June). And the Rocean was supposed to put its sparkling water dispensers at the Conrad New York hotel this past spring, but who knows how that went.

It should be noted that the SodaStream Professional is a good idea. We need to use fewer plastic bottles and drink less sugary sodas and this device seems like it can help with that. I just would like to hop in a time machine and fast forward to when we can safely go back to the office and use one.

Drinkmate Wants to Help You Make Fizzy Water on the Go

Everyone, it seems, is drinking sparkling water nowadays. Growth rates for the fizzy stuff have shot through the roof the last couple years as consumers eschew sugary sodas and embrace healthier lifestyles.

And seltzer water isn’t the only hydration trend that’s taken off. The hydro flask is having its own moment as consumers wake up to the problem of single use plastic and have made their water vessel of choice something of a fashion statement.

Combine these two trends and you’re probably asking what if you could make your own sparkling water on the go?

OK, maybe you aren’t asking that, but that is the question a company called i-Drink wants to answer with a new product called the Drinkmate instaFizz, a personal stainless “beverage bottle” that allows you to add your own bubbles to any non-carbonated beverage.

The product, which the company plans to debut next month at the Inspired Home Show, uses portable 8g CO2 cartridges to inject carbonation into the liquid. The CO2 cartridges are inserted into the lower cap and the gas is released once the cap is twisted. The bottle holds up to 18.6 ounces, but the maximum liquid volume for carbonating is 15.5 ounces.

Home carbonated beverage machines are not new. Drinkmate makes its own, alongside Pepsi-owned Sodastream and office machines like Bevi. But up until this point, there hasn’t really been a product that lets consumers fizz-up on the go.

So will consumers embrace the opportunity? Hard to say. The product’s fairly high price tag (MSRP is $59.99) might be one deterrent, while the ready availability of low-cost stationary home carbonators (the Drinkmate home machine sells for $87 on Amazon, while the SodaStream Fizzi goes for $69) could be another.

Still, if you’re a sparkling water fanatic who wants to make your own on the go, there’s finally a product for you in the instaFizz.

Startup rOcean Plans to Save the Oceans—Right from Your Tap

Home soda and beverage devices are in the news again thanks to PepsiCo’s recent $3.2B acquisition of home carbonation purveyor SodaStream and German startup Mitte’s recent funding announcement. Some obvious advantages of systems like these is their ability to give you more control over what you’re drinking while reducing your overall costs and household plastic waste. And while SodaStream has been aggressively repositioning to benefit from recent healthier water trends, let’s face it: with mixes like “Fountain Mist” and “Dr. Pete,” it originally debuted as a consumable-sustained alternative to expensive, store-bought sodas.

A new startup called rOcean is taking a different approach. Launching its first product through IndieGoGo earlier this year, rOcean is focusing on the earth and health benefits of enhancing and drinking your own water.

You’ll first notice that rOcean’s decidedly contemporary countertop device, the rOcean One, is larger than a SodaStream carbonator. That’s because there’s a lot more going on inside of it. It will filter, carbonate, and flavor your own tap water—even plugging into the water line to make operation nearly as simple as pouring from a faucet. You can manage your preferred flavor intensity and degree of carbonation from their app or directly on an integrated touch-screen control panel, and their bottles will have RFID tags that can be assigned to your favorite beverage recipes.

The rOcean One is also more expensive than SodaStream’s carbonators. The $349 estimated retail price is about twice the price of SodaStream’s highest-price option, but the savings come in the long term. You use your own tap water, and you’re not dependent on rOcean for proprietary, disposable flavor pods. Instead the rOcean One features reusable cartridges you can fill with your own, natural flavoring or from larger rOcean flavor refill packs (think Method-brand soap refills). And the water filters? They’re designed to be cheaper and significantly more effective than standard pitcher filters.

The open model that rOcean has embraced is an interesting one. While companies like Keurig and SodaStream rely on recurring income from licensed or direct retail sales, rOcean’s only consumables are its CO2 cartridges and water filters. The primary consumable—flavoring—is optional since you can bring your own.

For households interested in a healthy, earth-conscious alternative to expensive flavored or carbonated water beverages, rOcean seems like a logical alternative. But it comes with risk. While the crowd-funding campaign was wildly successful, and they’re now accepting a second round of pre-orders, this is still a new company delivering a connected product dependent on some proprietary consumables. The good news is that rOcean’s offering checks the right boxes for a good many people, helping them drink more water while saving time, money, … and the oceans!

Sunjay Guleria, rOcean’s founder and CEO, is optimistic. Following SodaStream’s acquisition, Guleria told us, “Pepsi buying SodaStream is good for the market overall.” He continues, “it validates the growth opportunities and shows that the big players are paying attention to recent changes in consumer preferences, where more people are opting for healthier and sustainable alternatives to single-use bottled water and sugary-based beverages.”

Will rOcean deliver on this promise? We’ll know more when the company fulfills its first pre-orders, slated for December of this year.

PepsiCo Buys SodaStream for $3.2 Billion

PepsiCo said today that it will buy SodaStream, makers of the countertop carbonation system, for $3.2 billion. The move not only pushes the sugary drink giant further into the healthy beverage market, but it also moves the company into more of a hardware space, which opens up new lines of recurring revenue.

Soda sales have been on the decline in recent years, with Pepsi soda brands in particular struggling to rebound. On the contrary, sparkling water sales have surged, driven in large part by millennials and their quest for new flavors and healthier ingredients. To capitalize on this trend, Pepsi launched its own line of colorful sparkling waters earlier this year called Bubly which has actually experienced strong growth since launch.

But with the SodaStream purchase, PepsiCo is also getting into a hardware solution for beverages. In addition to selling the machine itself, SodaStream also sells replacement CO2 cartridges and a wide variety of flavor concentrates. Its numbers over the last year have been good, with second quarter year-over-year revenue increasing 31.3 percent to $171.5 million.

Pepsi already has a line of product that is similar to SodaStream’s. Though the drinks aren’t carbonated, the Drinkfinity system lets users flavor their own water with special pods that are popped on the tops of a proprietary bottle design.

The SodaStream deal is also reminiscent of the Keurig Kold device, which was a pod-based home soda maker that actually had Coca-Cola as a partner before fizzling out after just ten months on the market in 2015. Earlier this year Keurig Green Mountain bought the Dr Pepper Snapple Group for $18.7 billion, but so far there have been no rumblings of a resurrected Kold-type device.

I’m curious about the long-term prospects for this PepsiCo/Sodastream deal and the overall home carbonation market in general. I bought a SodaStream a long time ago and used it pretty religiously for about a year. Then as seltzer water became more popular and more available, it was just easier to grab a six-pack and keep them in the fridge rather than refilling bottles, keeping them cold, blasting air (loudly) into them and remembering to exchange empty CO2 canisters at my local drug store. Yes, I realize that I’m abandoning the more eco-friendliness of SodaStream’s re-usable components, but — actually I don’t have a rebuttal to that. I just want convenience.

Now there are even more seltzer brands offering a wider range flavors that are available just about anywhere I go in the day. Will seltzer’s ubiquity beat SodaStream’s refillability?