Wendy’s soda test marketing making the grade

It might be the biggest thing since the soda jerk, a soft drink dispenser that is not limited to a few select flavors, but offers the consumer 125 different basic options and a seemingly unlimited number of mixing combinations.

The Coca-Cola Freestyle is being tested at Wendy’s restaurants in Houma as well as 47 of the fast food chain’s other New Orleans region locations.

“I’m drinking things I never thought I would,” said Wendy’s store manager Danielle Rideaux as she created a grape Sprite at the West Main Street location in Houma. “It’s really popular [with customers].”

The Coca-Cola Freestyle is about the size of a standard soft drink vending machine, but instead of being connected to canisters or stocked with large containers of product, the units employ technological workings suitable for the 21st Century.

Pre-mixed recipes of main soft drinks and added flavors are stored in 24 cartridges that resemble ink containers for computer printers. On a touch screen, the customer selects what combinations of flavors are desired for the purchase. Once a selection is made, the flavors mix with water and pour into the customer’s waiting cup.

Along with fruit punch and sparkling waters, consumers can mix and match to get flavors such as orange cola, peach Sprite or even, for the more daring, something like raspberry root beer. And according the Coca-Cola group director Jim Sanders, a traditionalist can still get a classic Coke.

“With this particular technology consumers were telling us, ‘We really like the variety that we see at convenience stores and supermarkets, but when we’re in restaurants or places where there are fountain dispensers we are limited to only five or six choices. So we want some of the rest of your portfolio. We want to experience that in restaurants,'” Sanders said of the Coca-Cola Freestyle origins.

Responding, Coca-Cola developed a product and technology to address consumer demand. At first, developers presented a machine about 20 feet long, with a web of tubes attached to it that would dispense more than 100 or more drinks at the push of a button. However, nobody wanted a 20-foot-long soft drink machine. The challenge was to make this workable. Designers spent seven years working on a system that resulted in what is now available.

“Consumers [also] had a perception that the quality in fountain drinks [in comparison to bottled products] was not consistent,” Sanders said. “They [might] get one that tasted one way at McDonald’s and another way at a rural convenience store. They wanted the consistency that our 8-ounce bottle had. So, with those two consumer challenges we set off to be able to solve them and that led us to Coca-Cola Freestyle.”

Sanders and Rideaux each noted that young consumers in particular enjoy the creative mix-and-match element of the soft drink dispenser. “They’ll take a Coke orange mixed with a Coke vanilla and do half of each in a cup and that tastes like a dream-sickle in their minds,” Sanders said. “It lets the consumer have a drink the way they want it.”

“Wendy’s got in early and said, ‘We like what you’re talking about,'” said Wendy’s director of area operations Andy Sims. “The feedback from customers is fantastic, especially the younger customers.”

Sims declined to specify product cost or gross margin made by Wendy’s on the Coco-Cola Freestyle, but did admit that for now the company is experiencing an approximately 15 percent increase per serving for the cost of making a drink than they had with previous soft drink dispensers. It is an element he expects to be changed as the machines become more popular and restaurants benefit from volume sales. He pointed out that prices to the customer have not changed. “We’re losing a little bit of profit [for now], but we don’t care. We think the customer is going to be blown out by the quality and selection and it is going to be a winner for us long term,” he said.

Store managers are trained to maintain the machines, check product levels, which Rideaux demonstrated can be done with a few touch screen moves, and trading out empty product mixtures. “It is a lot easier than those big bags [in boxes] we used to have,” she said.

“Some of the technology used in the machine [is based off] medical procedures used in hospitals,” Sims said, as he explained the drip element from various sources to produce a final result.

Sanders and Sims each noted that with Coca-Cola Freestyle being digitally controlled it is easy to track product preference off every unit. “If you think about the future and where this can go,” Sanders said. “There [might be] some flavor we haven’t even considered [for mass production] yet and we don’t know whether to introduce it or not. Coca-Cola Freestyle gives us a great way to put that out there and see how consumers interact with it, and how it stacks up against our other brands.”

Sanders said that even with the new variety of flavors, Coca-Cola will not forget its core products. “We always make sure that it treats Coca-Cola well because that is the lion’s share of our business,” he said. “When you hit the Coke button it immediately defaults to the big red Coke.”

Every time the Coca-Cola Freestyle is used, the consumer is basically mixing concentrated ingredients from recipes that involve spices, extracts, oils, sweetener and water with micro-dosing pumps.

“In the old fountain world, you’re sort of reliant on pressure and things like that to insure drink quality because you’re mixing a certain amount of water with a certain amount of syrup when you pour a drink,” Sanders said. “In the Coca-Cola Freestyle world we are digitally measuring and controlling, and precisely dosing in the right amount.”

If for some reason there is a technical problem with making a specific product, the machine will not dispense that beverage until a repair is made.

Sanders and Sims said that Coca-Cola Freestyle offers the consumer, the merchant and the manufacturer confidence in product quality and consistency no matter what beverage is being mixed. Even the live soda jerk could not always make that guarantee.