I saw this and was reminded of the descriptive SR texts that mention using eyedroppers to flavor soy foods.

"Programmable" drinks

It's cute, but I don't forsee it doing well in the open market.

That is wrong on so many, many levels.

So I get to pay for flavors I don't want and a delivery deice I won't use? Oh yeah, that product has promise.

The proper way to do this would be to buy the flavors separately in the form of droppers or tablets or whatnot, and then suggest you buy their Blind Soda.

Or, y'know, buy club soda. I've been adding flavors to club soda for an ungodly amount of time.

Customized soda isn't a super-new thing. Heck, when my parents were young, they had flavor tablets you could drop into water that worked sort of like alka-setzer to make stuff like cherry soda and strawberry soda.

I had some once. The only problem with them is that they all tasted like a gargantuan monkey asshole. They were _really_ bad.

Monkey asshole you say? Any idea where I can get some of these?

'Fraid not. I can't remember what the damned things were called. As for the monkey assholes, I'd try the zoo. They might have a couple in stock.

I think it was McDonald's that selling the flavor for a while when it got the King Kong merchandising contract.

on the bright side, you Do get to chose between more than 4-6 different flavors of pop.
which is a signifigant improvement in selection when compared to the tipical corner store.

I think the design will be a bit of a nightmare, because the product may become damaged mush more easily than the standard pop bottle.

But, seriously, when it comes to flavoring soda-type drinks, I generally go with, y'know. Semi-real flavors. Like maraschino cherries w/juice.

Back on topic, it's a neat bottle and belongs up there with Potion and Ramune, but I figure it's going to be in the same camp as buy one, enjoy it, and go back to the drinks that cost a dollar less.

I'll stick with my nuke cola

When I was in Scouts, we had made drinks we called 'swamp water' which was basically a portion of every single pop in the fountain line mixed together.
Coke/orange/root beer/Sprite (and ginger ale if it was on tap)

I can see people wanting to relive that

Heh, Dranem.

We called it a Zombie.

Reminds me of when my sisters and I were young, we were hanging out at our family's chinese restaurant. We did the whole put a little bit from each flavour from the soda dispenser into a cup and drink it.

I guess we were in the morbid group too, as we called 'em suicides also.

It's probably a regional thing. Here in texas (dallas/ft. worth area), it was called a "suicide"

Where at in DFW? I'm currently sitting in Sansom Park (i.e. North-West Fort Worth with bad tasting water). Tomorrow I'll be running SR4 in Benbrook.

I don't know if it's such a bad idea. The actual flavor is pennies on the dollar. Presumably the little bubbles of plastic only cost marginally more than the original bottle, since it's just more plastic, neh? In which case the benefit is soda machines only need to stock one type of bottle. That means they have to stock less often and it takes less time to do, and that means we pay less money to the stock boy. In fact, that cost savings of not having to sort or seperately treat the different bottles carries all the way back to the factory. So assuming the cost of the bottle isn't significantly more than it would be otherwise, it could have significant cost savings benefits.

However, I think the tablets is a better idea. You can offer a larger diversity of flavors and actually charge the consumer based on his actual rather than potential use.

So maybe it's a "Southern" thing?

Here in Eastern Kansas we call 'em suicides as well.

What is the base for sodas? Is it just soda water? If so, I could get a bunch of that on the cheap and just reuse the bottle until it was out of flavors. Although that is undoubtably more effort than cheap soda is worth.

In Alabama we called that a suicide as well.

But do these programable drinks taste the same as the factory mixed variety?

Heck, tap water tastes different depending on what label you put on the bottle.

Not to mention the quality of the bottle itself. Store-brand water usually uses cheap bottles that bleed into the water or something. Better bottles are thicker plastic, or in the case of my favorite foo-foo fancy mineral waters, glass.

Before I moved to the middle of BFE, I wouldn't have even thought of buying bottled water. But when the stuff that comes out of the tap is some of the most foul-smelling sludge imaginable, it's worth blowing a couple of bucks on a double-filtration system.

You don't have to be in BFE for that. I live in a "city" surrounded on all sides by another city. The water at my house tastes like someone poured dirt into it.

I'd think the mixing right before the nozzle is more so you don't have to throw out old soda that doesn't get used if nobody uses that particular syrup.

If they mixed it all up beforehand, it'd eventually get flat.

There's some kind of organic compound in our water.. just goes right through me - if you get my meaning.

Bottled water delivered by truck every 2 weeks and a personal water cooler is the solution we use

Seeing as the flavour beeds would be the syrup compound (What you usually get in tanks for commercial use) it would pretty much taste the same as buying the finished product already mixed. I say pretty much seeing as you'd have to make sure the syrup fully dilutes into the drink to get the full flavour, otherwise it'll vary in concentration if not mixed well.

It amuses me that we're still talking about this.

OK...
I grew up in Jersey (thank you, I'll kick my own ass later ) and we called'em suicides as well
I'm in the FW part of DFW in the lovely Pier 1 Place, living on the edge of Benbrook... those of us in these parts should get together and talk "shop"

I worked at a coffee shop, and we made Italian Sodas, using club soda and the syrups they use for teas and coffees. Those were great, and you can get flavors that Dr Pepper, Coke and Pepsi don't make.

My 2 cred on the bottle? It'll never work, because they won't be able to have "Lemon Cherry MonkeyAss" as a limited edition flavor to drive up sales. Also, they like to make you "choose" a flavor. We get "cola wars" and cool TV spots, and people get to feel that they're special based on the label of their beverage of choice (which isn't true, but the marketing gurus think people care like that)

Bottoms Up!

[Edit: Also, how would you mix it? Shake it up? All in all though, I could see other applications using this tech, like kids candies (baby bottle pops and the like) and I want to thank Azralon for finding this, 'cause I love NuTech! ]

I see this working better for medicines and vitamins and such. Alka Seltzer-in-a-bottle, or that Airborne vitamin brew. In my opinion ronin3338 hit it on the head why this won't really hit it big in the beverage market. The problem is choice: you're asking someone to think about what they want to drink after they've made the purchase. Sorry if this takes too dim a view on human nature, but when most people buy their drinks that's when they want to know what they're drinking, not after. People are afraid and in many cases intimidated by too many choices. Most false dichotomies like vanilla vs. chocolate, Democrat vs. Republican, Coke vs Pepsi, Us vs Them develop to simplify choices.

These guys want to add more choices to something that should be simple. Doomed.

Incidentally, mixed sodas were referred to as "suicides" in Florida in the 1980s and early 1990s.

ronin: did you ever game at Grand Slam before it closed?

The one on S Williams? Yeah, I played some Magic there. Mostly though, I hung around talking to Jim and buying comics
I liked that place much better than Lone Star (where I worked for a few years)

Another reason for it not to work is shelf space. One reason food companies come out with so many flavors and sizes has less to do with offering choice as it does with dominating a section of a store. Not only does it force you to look at their brands a greater percentage of the time (making it more likely that you'll purchase from them), but it also forces the retailer to keep a greater supply on hand (You have to buy it in cases, after all). It's a win-win situation, even if they have to pay a monkey to reformulate some bizarre concoction and advertise it every few months. At least it helps keep the ads fresh - how many times could we watch ads about how much better Coke is? Diet Crystal Superfine Black Cherry Vanilla LiveWire Hyperpowered Coke Blue with Limon can inspire even the dumbest of ad agencies to come up with something new to get your attention. Besides - you'll always buy at least one bottle. Who wants to be left out?

And let's not forget the wonders of Augmented Reality. I'm thinking of a container with a built-in ARO that plays the company jingle when opened, perhaps with an accompanying visual display.

Heh. Have the hacker set the Lone Star squad's commlinks to active mode, and then have the troll toss a couple cases of NERPS Cola into their general vicinity.

When was your Magic time there? I'm the guy in all the pictures on the wall of winners.

We could use a 4th player on Fridays, any Forrt Worthers interested? We usually cycle through games, from D&D to Wrhammer FRPG to Rolemaster to Shadowrun, with a little Silcore and hopefully soem Spacemaster thrown in here pretty soon.

Silicore? But yeah, I'm interested if you're looking for another player.

Ah, before my Magic time there (I was a late 90s) guy).

Silcore: shorthand for the Silhouette Core rules. I've never played it until recently. It's a fairly generic and easy system one of the guys is using to run a game based on Necromunda (which I also never played).

We're gaming this Friday (usually from ~5:00pm to some time in the AM depending on the game). Zip me an email at jt_mcmurray at hotmail dot com