Coca-Cola's Freestyle Brings Back Old-Fashioned Soda Counter Drinks

In the '50s, it wasn't Coca-Cola that keyed into the rainbow of flavors that could be combined with its carbonated elixir, it was the soda doctors slinging the product at diners and soda fountains across North America.

They opened the floodgates to cherry, vanilla, lime, lemon and more. By comparison, it took until the mid-eighties for the Coca-Cola company to start bottling cherry coke, and until 2002 to introduce that decades-old pairing with vanilla. To make matters worse, if you fell in love with a recently launched combo, it only took a few years for it to be discontinued, only to suddenly be resuscitated again without warning.

Soda fountain fans like me got tired of keeping track of which brands are available and Coca-Cola got tired of having 80% of their pop business in foreign markets, with North America aggressively fighting the battle of the bulge, so they created what they hope is a win-win solution for both of us.

Enter the Coca-Cola Freestyle. Piloted in July 2009 at 60 fast food and movie theatre locations across the U.S., The Freestyle is essentially a touch-screen soda fountain featuring between 104 and 106 of the beverage maker's carbonated and non-carbonated brands including Coke, Volt, Sprite, Fanta, Bargs, Dasani, Minute Maid and Hi-C.

The customer would touch a bubble with their chosen brand's logo on it. Once a drink is selected it may be further subdivided into its different flavours or low calorie variations. If regular or diet Coke is selected, suddenly the buyer is exposed to a variety of flavour shots, including ones previously only seen on store shelves in Russia and The Baltics (Orange Coke) or other flavours, like Grape-flavoured Dasani Water. Once your drink is selected, just press the pour button and watch it stream out.

Wait! -- I almost forgot to mention the major selling point that embodies both the "free" and the "style" in the machine's name. The user controls the pour, meaning that you can fill a third of the drink with Minute Maid raspberry juice, then, a third with Sprite and top it off with orange Hi-C for a kind of tropical non-alcoholic spritzer. Now, think about that for a second: with up to a reported 106 brands, what you end up swishing around your gullet is only limited by your imagination.

The whole enterprise takes advantage of a marketing trend that has really picked up speed since the commencement of the 21st century. It's a marketing strategy that centres on individual choice and goes after people who are resistant to conventional marketing. Starbucks is doing it with their Frappaccino: However You Want It campaign and it's also the central philosophy behind a more clandestine technique called Alternate Reality Games.

Coke has borrowed the spy-vs-spy intelligence gathering tactics found in all ARGs, which, in all cases, appear to be random, found games or occurrences, but are actually usually product tie-ins of some kind. You see, while you're pouring your drink, cameras and sensors are sending data back to Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta and the machine's owner -- Big Brother style. The machine is spying on you, recording the brands sold, the times of the day they were sold, troubleshooting information, and service data, like when the machine needs to be refilled.

From the company's perspective, this could help them get the jump on the latest and greatest beverage trends. Would it not be amazingly bizarre if Coke released a tropical blend in the supermarket based on thousands of repetitions of a seemingly random drink combination from the machine?

This is also a high-priced gamble for the company, given that the technology dropping the flavour shots is the same used to deliver precise dosages of medication and it has the capability to blend 46 ounce packages of concentrate, instead of the traditional five gallon box of syrup. It also uses the same radio frequency identification present in insta-payment technology in order to detect when it has ran out of ingredients and communicates its needs for resupply to other units.

In the U.S., people don't seem to care that the machines are spying on them and recording their drinking choices because some are driving up to 100 miles just to try out the machine. Thankfully, If you live in the Greater Toronto Area, you don't have to drive that far to enjoy The Coke Freestyle.

Toronto became the first test market for The Freestyle in Canada in May 2012 and is now available at flagship entertainment venues, such as Canada's Wonderland and The Scotiabank Theatre, as well as fast food franchises, such as Hero Certified Burgers and Wendy's. Though Canada's Freestyles have only 104 beverages, as opposed to the 125 favours available in the U.S., it still may change what's available on store shelves in this country as well. Time will tell, as success for The Freestyle in Canada will be indicated by whether the machines roll out nationally. Find a Freestyle near you at www.facebook.com/cocacolafreestyle.