Cana One Beverage Machine Makes Custom Drinks in Seconds
Tech
Speaker 1: It's so dark. <laugh>, I'm gonna cry.
Speaker 2: We're here at the lab for a startup called Canna, which makes a machine that lets you create any cold beverage you want. So we're gonna see how they break down flavors to how they build them back up and then get them in this Canna one machine that lets you pour out whatever you want. We saw this last year when they first announced the product, but I'm here to try out my own concoctions and see what I make. Let's try it out.
Speaker 2: It might be hard to imagine what [00:00:30] an energy drink has in common with a cocktail or a seltzer with an iced coffee. They seem like entirely different beverages, but it turns out there's just a small fraction of compounds that gives each of those drinks their unique flavor, smell, color, and texture. The vast majority of any beverage, about 95% is just water, which you already have at home. Taking that idea, the team at Canada has bet the last three years building what it calls a molecular beverage printer. Basically a machine that can create virtually any drink you want and customize it. [00:01:00] You can also adjust flavors, sugar, caffeine, and alcohol levels and add nutrients. The idea is to not only simplify and personalize the experience of getting your favorite beverage, but to also cut back on the more than 540 million tons of CO2 generated by the beverage industry each year. According to Canna,
Speaker 3: The way in which human beings make and distribute stuff is just fundamentally broken. And you can support 8 billion people on this planet in the ways we're doing it. Lots of plastic containers, almost 2 trillion containers. Each of those takes about 400 [00:01:30] years to break down in the wild, and it's all a function of how stuff is manufactured centrally distributed out to the edge, and then goes in this crash. And we felt like there's a better way to build people all of the stuff that they want without any other waste.
Speaker 2: The machine is designed for homes and offices. You can scroll through thousands of beverage options from various companies and creators on the canna ones built-in touchscreen, and then pick whatever calls out to you.
Speaker 3: When you click on it, you're gonna be able to see all of the options to personalize that beverage. It's not just about picking a beverage, but it's also being able to personalize [00:02:00] that on the fly. And you click pour and it pours the beverage. Simple as that.
Speaker 2: You'd be forgiven for thinking the canon is just another beverage machine in a fairly saturated market, but the tech behind this machine is much more complex than anything on store shelves.
Speaker 3: It's taking individual compounds and then recreating stuff on the fly. And that's very, very different from anything anyone else can do on the planet today.
Speaker 2: A cartridge inside the machine dispenses the right ingredients [00:02:30] and the right amounts to create thousands of drink variations. Cartridges last about a month and new ones will ship automatically to you for free. You pay by drink ranging from about 10 cents to $5 per beverage. The exact price is up to brands to decide. Years of research have gone into breaking down and reconstructing the flavors in a variety of popular drinks using fewer ingredients so you can have them at the ready whenever. This graph called a chromatogram represents the similarities between a range of beverages.
Speaker 4: So what we're actually looking at is [00:03:00] the signatures of three wines. Two are white wines and one is red. And as you can tell, these are very, very similar signatures, right? The peaks occur about the same locations, and actually the location of the peak tells us that there is a molecule there. So there's a molecule here, here, here. And so they share the same molecules, however they taste different. Why is that? The concentrations, which is actually the area under the peak, is what gives a different wine. It's different signature. We're now [00:03:30] realizing through the large volume of data that we've collected, we can mix and match and create any beverage you want and you can print it on our machine whenever you want. This is the machine responsible for decoding those beverages into that signature of molecules.
Speaker 2: The fruitier. Is this the cherry? What is, oh no, no, I don't like this one. Okay, so all of those different scs were from one sample. So what it does is it breaks down all those different scs. So you get banana and fruit and this really strange fermented fruit [00:04:00] scent that I really just did not like. But that's how beverages are. There are some flavors you like and some that you don't. But what's really fascinating here is it it collects all of those different scents just from one sample. Oh and oh, another one's coming through. It smells like dirt <laugh>. So this is where it all comes together. We saw the flavor breakdown and we saw the scent breakdown here we have 83 different compounds that all come together into this jar to create that perfect coffee flavor. So when you go to the machine and you wanna have some coffee, [00:04:30] you'll get something like this. And it's really cool because even though it just looks like a clear liquid, it smells exactly like a cup of coffee. We have finally made it to the machine itself. Yes. So what are we looking at here?
Speaker 5: So this is our prototype Canna one. Uh, this device has been in development for about three years. This design, exterior design is going to be what we intend to ship internally. This device is fully featured. This is the water reservoir that is filled [00:05:00] from your tap. We have a CO2 canister and then we have a sugar and an ethanol cartridge. So we have a couple beverages to demo for you. Alright, so one of the first ones we're gonna print for you is a orange energy drink.
Speaker 2: Cheers. That tastes really good. Okay, definitely taste the orange. Definitely tastes like a little bit of carbonation there. It's not too sweet. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. This is actually very good. I like this a lot.
Speaker 2: So now we're at the creator studio and this is where [00:05:30] you can customize a drink. You can change the combination of things because you can make whatever you want with whatever combinations you want. I'm gonna play around with that. I mean, full disclosure, this probably won't end up tasting good, but let's just see how many different combinations and alterations I can do. Let's do a lemon soft drink. Some black cherry cuz why not? We'll get a little bit of that. Mintiness, not too much. Let's do raspberry. Cause I think that sounds fun. A little bit more of that. Some blueberry as well. Let's just get all the berries and just for the hell of it, we're gonna add some basil. You know what? [00:06:00] Some strawberry too. All the berries, like I said, add some sugar. Okay, let's just be crazy. Let's just add some caffeine. I don't know why we're just gonna do it. I'm just gonna go ahead and pour that. All right, we'll find out how, how bad this is. Let's try it out. Actually not bad. I actually really like that. It's sweet. I'm really glad I bumped up the sugar there. Strawberry and lemon scent that I'm smelling. It's not super bubbly, but it definitely has that carbonated flavor. Honestly. [00:06:30] Sugar fixes everything. Maybe I did a little too much sugar, but at least it's not tart. So progress Now I'm going to brand it and uh, I can name it whatever I want. And tribute to cnet. We're going to call this CNET Cola
Speaker 2: Because Coca-Cola is overrated. I feel like we need a fun description, an undertone of lemon with hints of strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, all the berries. [00:07:00] You'll love it. Don't forget to hit like and subscribe <laugh> for more content. Okay, we're gonna publish Te Canna. Yay. We haven't seen at cola. So this, that image and that name is going to be on the device just to live on forever. I'm kind of sorry, I probably should have worked a little bit harder on that. <laugh>. I tried a bunch of non-alcoholic drinks, but this machine can make alcoholic beverages, which I can't have. So my fearless colleague, Andy, is going to sample a mojito for us.
Speaker 6: Tough job. I [00:07:30] know. All right, let's give us a try. This is the classic mojito. I really do like mojitos too, so it's really nice. It tastes like a mojito. You can definitely tell there's alcohol in there. It doesn't taste like a virgin or anything like that. It's tastes like a mojito. Yes, you'd never know that this was made by a computer. Delicious,
Speaker 2: Verified alcoholic and non alcoholic beverages. Amazing celebrities and influencers can use Creator Studio to make and brand their own beverages, [00:08:00] which fans can then enjoy almost instantly. Right now, can's only focused on cold beverages, but the goal is to expand into more drinks, including hot ones in future generations of the machine. And the tech is only slated to become more futuristic. Someday. Artificial intelligence might help you choose that perfect drink.
Speaker 3: 20 years from now, you're gonna be able to rep, replicate a 20 year old scotch, or you're gonna be able to describe how you feel and say, look, I'm feeling like something like this. Software, ai, whatever you want to call it, can start to generate things that make sense just for you in a way that [00:08:30] you're never gonna be able to find on a store shelf
Speaker 2: Anywhere. Some other things that are on the roadmap for the can of one are things like beer, hot beverages and protein shakes, but for now this is priced at $900 and will ship by the end of the year so you can make whatever cold beverages your heart desires. Thank you so much for watching and don't forget to hit like and subscribe for more content and let us know in the comments what beverage you would make. Cheers.
