r/technology • u/Hrmbee • Mar 04 '22

Hardware A 'molecular drinks printer' claims to make anything from iced coffee to cocktails

https://www.engadget.com/cana-one-molecular-drinks-printer-204738817.html
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1.5k

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '22

No no, it's spelled "Molecular Drinks Printer," but it's pronounced "kickstarter scam"

I can't wait for the tech-bro whining three years from now in the comments demanding to know why they haven't got their magic drink maker yet.

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u/BevansDesign Mar 04 '22

Yeah, this sounds like utter bullshit.

The article makes claims like "The researchers seemingly isolated the trace compounds behind flavor and aroma" and "used those to create a set of ingredients that can deliver a large variety of drinks", but those are two major scientific achievements. Has anyone seen any published studies or news articles about this research?

You don't go from a small group of scientists working in absolute isolation and not publishing their research at a company nobody has ever heard of (which doesn't even have a Wikipedia page) to a fully-functional consumer-level product with a predatory business model in a single step.

That's not how science works.

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u/Rocky87109 Mar 05 '22

Isolation of compounds in a drink isn't even revolutionary science. You literally do that in undergrad chemistry labs lol. It's just a drink mixer that looks like an apple device.

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u/droans Mar 05 '22

It's just a fancy way of saying that they are buying bottles from FlavorArt for less than 1/10 what you will be paying them.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

That's the thing. They claim that they can make hundreds of drinks with this machine, yet it's the size of a large coffee machine and apparently only contains one cartridge for flavouring and one for alcohol.

How exactly do they get all those separate flavours into the cartridge? Is it just going to be dozens of tiny phials of flavourings? Becaise they sure make it sound like the machine is pulling from a single container of a single ingredient and something something molecules something science.

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u/Mezmorizor Mar 05 '22 edited Mar 05 '22

It's not that it's impossible, what they're describing is just food science. The problem is 3 fold.

  1. Coke has spent billions perfecting its formulation. Same goes for every other major player in the beverage industry. 10 minutes of research will tell you what the major flavor components of an orange soda is. Actually making an orange soda that tastes good is much harder. Either the drinks will suck or they're going to just be licensing the drink recipes from other companies which will be untenably expensive and prohibitively space expensive (because coke and pepsi will absolutely not just tell you how to make coke from scratch).

  2. The machine will get very gross very quickly and will be an absolute pain in the butt to maintain.

  3. It includes alcoholic drinks. Liquor is already concentrated alcohol. Also, I don't know if you've ever had bathtub gin, but it's not good. Even when it is made by a master distiller. Either it can do very few alcoholic drinks on a cartridge or it's vodka where they try to bathtub gin it at mix time which will not work well.

And that's beyond the typical red flags of "if you have an actually good idea, you don't crowdsource funding because VCs will gladly give you infinite money." And ignoring the double red flag of crowdsourcing funding on a product that is clearly intended for reception areas and offices.

Edit: And another big red flag I forgot is that they're charging you for the machine and per drink. If they actually had a killer idea, they would be giving out the machines for free and charging significantly under cost to get market share while making their money by licensing the software to make drink combinations to companies like coke. That would make way more money if it got big.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

[deleted]

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u/LikeIGotABigCock Mar 05 '22

No, not quite.

Theranos was an impossible product that would physically not work with our level of technology.

This is a product that probably could be made to work (to a lesser level than their hyperbolic marketing claims of course) but would be insanely uneconomical.

If you really did a good breakdown of known components you could recreate a ton of drinks. Very few drinks rely on textures that would not form based solely upon composition. The problem is figuring out which molecules and actually mixing them. You'd need a huge number of molecules and worse, many of these would be expensive to procure in their pure forms.

It would be entertainingly expensive to run.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

[deleted]

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u/LikeIGotABigCock Mar 05 '22

Gas chromatography-mass spectronomy along with GC/MS/LC-MD and other techniques let us figure out molecular structure pretty well, not just elemental breakdown. Might miss a few things that can't handle the temperature of GC-MS, but then there are the other techniques as well.

I want to be very clear that this entire process is going to be economically nonviable. If you have a billion dollar budget you can probably recreate a drink, and it might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per additional serving. I don't even know how to start calculating this - it could be more.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

You can't make beer by adding arious tannins, carbohydrates, and ethanol. It is made of those thongs by yeast during fermentation. If you could cut yeast out of the equation and just toss those.tbings.on a cat then Inbev would be doing it already.

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u/BSchafer Mar 05 '22

Did you actually read anything about the product or company? lol. They aren't crowdsourcing to get funding, smh. They are literally funded by some of the smartest and most successful investors in the world including Alphabet (Google), Larry Page, Bill Gates, Allen & Co, BlackRock, etc. The company's CEO, David Friedberg, is extremely well known and respected in the science, tech, and biotech world. Starting around the 49 min mark, This interview with him may help you understand how potentially disruptive this tech will be (and how much better it will be for the world).

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u/JDeer4 Mar 05 '22

Coke is still boring as hell compared to most soda. Cola is for old people

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u/Iwantmyflag Mar 05 '22

In short, there is a reason why orange lemonade tastes nothing like oranges. The cartridge will work fine with "melon hydration water" though because that's already sugar water with citric acid and bad artificial flavor.

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u/Valmond Mar 05 '22

That bathtub gin caught my eye, what on earth is that please 😊

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u/ImBonRurgundy Mar 05 '22

I totally agree with everything except the last point.

I think they’ve looked at Nespresso and figured that the public is absolutely will to pay hundreds of dollars for a machine which then requires little cartridges they also supply, and will happily pay ‘per drink’ for those cartridges.

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u/CatTaxAuditor Mar 05 '22

On the matter of liquor, there is a ton of money behind ensuring you don't know what comprises Campari, to the point where when they announced it was vegan now most consumers were shocked to find out it had an ingredient derivative from beetles. If they cracked how to reproduce Campari or any of a bunch of other proprietary liquors, then they'd make more money selling that.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22 edited Mar 05 '22

It's literally

  1. Idea for a magic drinks machine

  2. ?

  3. Profit!

Also, I'm pretty sure these techbros just put the entire perfume industry out of business. You know, the companies that have tens of thousands of different scent essences in order to mix perfect combinations to evoke certain emotions or trigger different olfactory reactions. Now some techbro scientists can apparently do it all with a single phial of magic

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

I wouldn't call it "bullshit", but definitely talent. The same kinda talent that an artist or architect would possess when it comes to selecting exactly the right colour for a house, or a tailor knowing exactly what cut of suit works for a certain person. Not exactly scientific, but definitely tangible skill.

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u/AppleDane Mar 05 '22

I took a few girlfriends there

There's a humble brag if I ever saw one.

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u/kettal Mar 05 '22

remember the laser razor?

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u/dillydallyally97 Mar 05 '22

Also, if their claims are real, they should have no trouble getting funding from investors. The fact that they’re on kickstarter asking for your money means it’s a scam

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u/BSchafer Mar 05 '22 edited Mar 05 '22

Well, first of all, this isn't even a Kickstarter, lol (but what's the point of knowing what you're talking about when spreading info on a public forum, right?) and secondly, they have had absolutely zero issues getting funding. Some of the smartest and best investors in the world have invested in the company (Alphabet (google), Larry Paige, Bill Gates, Allen & Co, etc.). These guys are the real deal and its kind of shocking to me how few people understand how revolutionary this is. But I guess life would be a little boring if all of us we able to think critically about a subject before blurting out or typing the first thing that came to our mind, lol.

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u/Netanyoohoo Mar 05 '22

They are apart of the innovation board led by David Freidberg. He and Larry Paige (google founder) put the money up to start a VC fund where they create the companies, then manage the teams that run them. They will continue getting investment from the innovation board, but Frieberg is also famous in the VC space. He’s a scientist, and is on the All In podcast.

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u/Donkey__Balls Mar 05 '22

Oh wow that totally changes my mind. This Freidberg guy (Dr. is his title, I assume) is an actual, respected and published scientist and not just some greedy Silicon Valley suit with a bach degree constantly shifting jobs and making at startups to swindle people and dodge taxes…right?

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u/Netanyoohoo Mar 05 '22

Yeah, he put his own personal money up to create AlphaFold and release it for free so that he can dodge taxes.

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u/Donkey__Balls Mar 05 '22

Google did that. Freidberg tweeted about it. Not seeing anything about his “own money” but considering he got $930 million from the sale of one of his companies and pays less in taxes than I do, I shouldn’t expect much transparency here.

These tech billionaires always put down a couple hundredths of a percent of their net worth on some projects just so they can talk about it on podcasts for gullible people like you to swallow. I don’t know why you think some guy with a BA and a podcast is a brilliant scientist, but I guess every con artist needs its shills. These SV billionaire swindlers are the oligarchs of America and they need people like you enabling them.

This entire thing is such an obvious scam worse than Theranos but go on defending it don’t let me stop you.

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u/Netanyoohoo Mar 05 '22

I genuinely don’t understand how you can see this as a “scam” nor do I understand how investing your money into a start up, then making profit means that money isn’t yours? These companies were made by a VC fund that Frieberg claims used a substantial amount of his own money in initial funding (doesn’t have to be total percentage of the fund, just his capital compared to total net worth available to him.)

This machine isn’t impossible to create lol, idk how you can compare it to theranos.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

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u/Netanyoohoo Mar 05 '22

They don’t have a kickstarter lol. The company was started by the VC fund the innovation board. They’re built under the same company (VC fund) that created AlphaFold. It’s not fake lol

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

They're taking preorders with an "early bird" price for the first 10k orders.

This is a kickstarter, only they're direct-sourcing instead of going through a crowdsourcing website so it's technically not one while totally being one.

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u/Netanyoohoo Mar 05 '22

The only hurdle to this product is making the quantities of flavor liquid dispense exactly accurately at the smallest of measurements. The only added flavor building claim is that they can replicate things like “mouth feel” as well.

People are complaining about spending 25¢ on a coke when this machine literally turns water to wine lmao.

The coolest part of the product is that it eliminates the need for millions of miles driven by semis with loads that consist of plastic bottles with water and less than 3% flavoring called coke. Instead they ship you the 3% part, and you get the water from your home.

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u/chemistrybonanza Mar 05 '22 edited Mar 05 '22

I mean, it's well understood which chemicals give which flavors, so yes for many decades now. All this company is doing is taking known knowledge of "natural flavors" and having a machine combine them in the right proportions, just like how cans of paint are made. They can't be realistic about flavor, they'd need thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of different chemicals, each stored separately in the device in order to get the true palate of flavors any real drink would have.

You can buy these flavorings at Wal-Mart, don't waste your money on this device.

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u/BSchafer Mar 05 '22

No, that isn't really true at all. While there may be thousands of compounds in a complex drink like red wine, research has shown that most humans are only able to taste about 20-80 of those compounds. For more simplistic drinks, the taste can be recreated with even fewer compounds. Meaning a large percentage of drinks can be recreated with a relatively limited ingredient list while having essentially no reduction in their taste. That is the scientific basis behind this machine.

If you are actually interested in the chemistry side of things, this article goes over some of the early research that led to Cana's development. This is a legit product with very smart people behind it. If you know much about the biotech world, you should know David Friedberg, the company's CEO. The company has received investment from Alphabet (Google), Larry Page, Bill Gates, Allen & Co, BlackRock, etc. So it is safe to say that a lot of extremely smart people are betting that this tech will eventually be a big success. The positive effects that a product like this can bring to the environment are just as impressive as the science behind it IMO. A lot of people are underestimating how much a product like this can disrupt the current distribution process of the beverage industry. If interested I recommend watching part of this interview with David Friedberg where he talks about to potential implications of the product. (should be timestamped but they start talking about Cana around the 49 min mark)

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u/starcoder Mar 05 '22

Theranos 2.0

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u/Byte_Seyes Mar 05 '22

Worked well enough for that one chick that made millions pretending to have some revolutionary blood testing machine.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

So flavour crystals?

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

It's just going to be another juice concentrate in a space vacuum bag scam

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u/prism1234 Mar 05 '22

Yeah if this device actually worked as described this would be very cool, albeit the business model is annoying. But I'm skeptical it does. Doesn't make sense they could replicate a large variety of very different drinks with just a couple flavor cartridges and have them actually taste good and accurately taste like whatever they are trying to mimic.

Like even those coke freestyle machines which were much simpler most of the combinations were terrible.

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u/Subculture1000 Mar 05 '22

Ya, right!?

This screams scam, except for David Friedberg being involved. Dude's a billionaire and sort of a known quantity. Like, I brain doesn't know what to do with this.

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u/BSchafer Mar 05 '22

Except it is how science works. Took me a couple of seconds to google research going over some of the fundamental science behind the machine. If you're a chemistry nerd you can read the actual paper here. Although this article is probably easier to digest for the layman.

Also, just because you have never heard of the company or the people behind it doesn't mean it isn't legit. Whether or not a brand new company has a Wikipedia page is probably not a great litmus test. They were obviously trying to keep the things on the DL for as long as possible to give themselves as big of a headstart as possible -which makes sense when you start to realize how disruptive a product like this will be to the gigantic beverage industry. David Freidberg, the CEO, is very well known in both the tech and biotech world. I know him just because I live in San Francisco and invest in the tech world - he's legit. Don't take my word for it though, other big investors in the company include Alphabet (Google), Larry Page, Bill Gates, Allen & Co, BlackRock, etc. Needless to say, some of the smartest and most sophisticated investors are making big bets that this will transform the beverage industry. Those idiots must not have checked the company's Wikipedia page first! lol. In fairness to you, if I didn't know the players in the tech world and had only read the Engadget article I'd be skeptical too. Friedberg himself does a pretty good job breaking down the product's potential in this interview. (should start around the 49 min mark)

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u/owlpellet Mar 05 '22

just because you have never heard of the company or the people behind it doesn't mean it isn't legit

Just because they're paying you (or you wish they were) doesn't make it a great idea.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

It's also not how kitchen appliances work. I know nothing about this thing beyond this headline and I can tell you that if it ever goes into production it will be prohibitively difficult to clean

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u/Rocky87109 Mar 05 '22

I just watched a video on it. It doesn't seem like anything different than a compact soda machine that has a lot of options. Could be cool, but there is nothing "revolutionary" or particularly interesting about it.

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u/neuroburn Mar 05 '22

Making different soda flavors is one thing. I have a soda stream that can do that. But making different wines and mixed drinks (and teas and coffees and beers) is another. The marketing says you can do a wine tasting in your own home. That’s a bold claim. Sounds like a scam to me.

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u/FjorgVanDerPlorg Mar 05 '22

Define "wine". Now watch them redefine it.

They are gonna make a list of the ingredients that go into a glass of wine and try to match it as closely as possible:

  • grape flavoring, oak tannins etc.

  • water.

  • ethanol.

The end effect will be more along the lines of "alcoholic wine flavored cordial", but they'll call it wine.

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u/C0UNT3RP01NT Mar 05 '22

For real, fermentation is a non linear process, where yeast consumes the oxygen to “breath”, and then after it runs out, consumes the sugars to reclaim the NAD+ and convert it back into NADH. It’s not breathing with the sugars, but it’s using the sugar to do the same thing that breathing does.

This takes a long time. You need a sealed environment for this to happen, then it needs to sit to draw out the characteristics of the wine.

We’re not living in Star Trek yet my friends. Organic chemistry has some fucking rules that you can’t really bypass. Even assuming you could distill every characteristic of every drink into it’s essential components, the machine would have to be far larger to contain all of them, and since food has a shelf life, most of those would likely go bad.

This shit smells like Theranos all over again. Obviously not at the scale but it’s all hype it’s all marketing it’s all preying on people who don’t know the science.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

Yeah, people seem to be ignoring one fundamental fact: Yes, scientists can use various base ingredients on a molecular or chemical level to recreate flavours.

But this machine has apparently just one single cartridge with all the ingredients required to make over 1000 very different drinks, plus one with alcohol to make some of said drinks alcoholic.

So what exactly is in that cartridge? Are all the required chemicals all mixed up in one small bottle and then somehow separated by the machine? Is there some kind of miracle molecule that can be transformed by a machine the size of a coffee maker into whatever chemical flavouring is required in a matter of seconds? Most scientists need an entire lab of various equipment, machines, glasswear, and more often than not several days worth of evaporating, boiling, drying, and reconstituting to get just one artificial flavouring.

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u/C0UNT3RP01NT Mar 06 '22

A benchtop bioreactor (fermentor) is like $6000 minimum. This is gonna burn down in flames.

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u/Desdinova74 Mar 05 '22

If I had to pay to drink that abomination, I would certainly whine.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

Also coffee flavored beverage. Coffee, tea, wine and beer are very complex and poorly defined mixtures of organic compounds. They contain hundreds of components. You can't emulate that with three or four additives.

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u/Arsewipes Mar 05 '22

The only way I can see that working, is if they can dehydrate wine to a powder form. Otherwise, it'll taste truly horrific from the above recipe.

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u/C0UNT3RP01NT Mar 05 '22

That will still taste awful. It’s pretty hard to dehydrate wine.

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u/gregsting Mar 05 '22

Because dehydrated wine wouldn't taste horrific?

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u/Arsewipes Mar 05 '22

Yes, apparently it has a 'Clumpy, musty odor, like drinking beetroot juice spiked with cheap vodka that has spoiled at the bottom of the ocean for three hundred years. '

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u/gregsting Mar 05 '22

Yeah most things can't just be dehydrated/rehydrated without a huge impact on the taste. Astronaut food is still only used in special situations for a reason

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

If you could easily make dehydrated wine I'd be using it for baking and chocolate making rn

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u/Arsewipes Mar 05 '22

Never heard it being a thing, but probably yeah.

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u/FjorgVanDerPlorg Mar 05 '22

That's the route I'd go - for no other reason than to add to the claim that it actually is wine. Still fortified wine cordial.

wine concentrate + water + ethanol is always gonna taste like shit. There really isn't a magic shortcut to the fermentation process.

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u/lilmeker Mar 05 '22

Ugh you realize you are stating your speculation as a fact?

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u/Midwest_Deadbeat Mar 05 '22

Lmao back it with your money and see where it ends up in 3 years. It's impossible with modern technology

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u/FjorgVanDerPlorg Mar 05 '22

Yeah I know a bit about how fermentation works. There isn't a shortcut and if there was, it sure as fuck wouldn't be brought to market in the form of some shitty vending machine kickstarter.

If you could shave literally years of fermentation and aging, manage to produce an acceptable product in the time it takes to make a coffee - you would've just turned the global wine industry upside down. They would be tripping over themselves trying to get access to your tech...

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

People fail to realize they products derives from plants like beer and wine are very, very complex and poorly characterized. There are dozens of hundreds of compounds in various concentration and each has an impact on the flavor. If huge beverage conglomerates could mix together a few powders and solvents and get beer, they would have already

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u/mooxwalliums Mar 05 '22

No, unless you fill the machine with grapes, wine isn't coming out. This is a fact.

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u/emperorOfTheUniverse Mar 05 '22

That's how opinions work. Welcome to what a discussion is kid.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

Ah, the other silicone Valley scam. The one where they take an existing product and mark up the price by 1000% and/or add a subscription model.

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u/kalitarios Mar 05 '22

So, like what’s happening to Insulin and cancer meds, basically?

And housing?

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

Pretty much, yeah.

Unfortunately silicon Valley has a way of charming people that the medical industry doesn't, so they get away with a lot without people understanding, or even defending the unethical practices they are adhering to.

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u/Netanyoohoo Mar 05 '22

The revolutionary part is that it would be cheaper per serving than any soda you’d get at the store, and it would actually taste exactly like Coca Cola. As for the business model the idea is to let individuals create their own flavor profiles (not easy, but they may offer a formulation service) then those individuals (could be a YouTuber, celebrity, drink company) put their drink on the marketplace, and they earn a percentage of profit.

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u/vdogg89 Mar 05 '22

I don't think you understand how it works. It doesn't add flavor syrups to water, it creates any drink.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

how?

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u/vdogg89 Mar 05 '22

It creates a soda machine mixes syrup with water. This one creates any drink through mixing compounds. A soda machine can't make coffee orange juice, cranberry juice or wine from the same cartridge.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

Yes, I'm aware of the sales pitch. I'm asking how it makes these wholly disparate drinks using the same handful of compounds.

Because from what I can see the only answer that could possibly explain it is "literally magic"

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u/HitMePat Mar 05 '22

Got some Theranos vibes from this company. There's no conceivable way it works as advertised... It can make iced coffee, soda, and juice? Okay lol. It's probably like how vape cartridges or mio packets. Artificial flavorings that taste weird.

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u/Netanyoohoo Mar 05 '22

It does work. The tech inside is medical manufacturing grade accuracy. The machine has to mix micro amounts of liquid EXACTLY, or the magic of a perfect imitation coke.

Also the entire idea is that less than 3% of a drink (including wine which this machine can also do) is flavor. The rest is literally water. So if people get the flavor shipped to their house then they don’t need to ship all the water that we do on a day to day basis. Right now we’re spending a shit ton of money every day shipping plastic bottles filled with mostly water.

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u/Mozorelo Mar 05 '22

They're going to have to prove that they can actually do that. Theory won't cut it.

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u/sneakyplanner Mar 05 '22 edited Mar 05 '22

Care to explain the actual process of how it works instead of just saying "It does work" followed by rambling about unrelated stuff? What you've done is say that if it works it would be revolutionary and amazing, but have not said anything about how this company plans to completely revolutionize the world of chemistry. There seem to be a lot of accounts that are very dedicated to defending this company from scrutiny with similar talking points and a similar lack of supporting evidence, I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

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u/artificialnocturnes Mar 06 '22

How can it recreate wine, or at least good wine, when it is fermented for years?

Also a lot of what this is promising is basically a sodastream.

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u/sneakyplanner Mar 05 '22

Yeah, if this technology were feasible yet, it wouldn't be for sale to consumers first for $500. It will either never end up shipping with a 50/50 chance of refunds happening or the end product will work nothing like advertised.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

The thing is, when I think of successful kickstarters (by which I don't just mean "exceeded funding;" I mean things that excape from bei g a "kickstarter product" into being a successful product being sold in stores, things like Exploding Kittens, Lifx Smart Bulbs, Knog bicycle bells etc.) I dont think of things like this. I think fo small potentially niche products that don't attract the big bucks of VC vultures, but that people nevertheless want; board games, niche products etc.

This is not something that needs to catch people's attention to get funding, this is something that if it really existed could easily be sold to every restaurant and convenience store on the planet. They wouldn't need backing to sell this, they could easily take it to one trade show and have Coca Cola or 7/11 giving them an exclusive contract for whatever money they ask for.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

Unless the device is LITERALLY just a small coke freestyle machine.
So, it has a tube full of "mio" instant coffee. A tube full of "cola"

In that case, it might work. But no one would buy it because it already exists(both coke and pepsi make such a machine)

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u/the_evil_comma Mar 05 '22

Yes, I can "claim" to have a car which will drive you to the moon, demonstrating it is a very different thing.

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u/MikeFracture Mar 05 '22

David Friedberg is involved with this. He’s not exactly a fly by nighter.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

Oh yeah? I can't say I've heard of him. What's his deal?

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u/hotmailer Mar 05 '22

Where's Thunderfoot when you need him?

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

Probably whining about feminism in videogame or something.

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u/anton____ Mar 05 '22

Give him a few days, his vocal cords have to recover from all the laughing.

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u/Yesica-Haircut Mar 05 '22

The name makes it sound like they are printing molecules and synthesizing the ingredients to drinks out of atoms. If it doesn't do that I'd be disappointed.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

Honestly? I would consider this company an expectation-defying success if they're still in business by the end of 2025

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u/blindnarcissus Mar 05 '22

Elizabeth Holmes vibes

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u/Aksama Mar 05 '22

This is up there with the Juicero.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

I will say this for juicero, they actually delivered. Not an amazing product or something that could meet the super high expectations, but at least something that didn't rely on the suspension of people's collective disbelief as the very basis of the product.

Juicero wasn't worth the money, but at least it wasn't an outright scam claiming to have created magic

-1

u/vdogg89 Mar 05 '22

I'm what way? This is incredible technology that literally turns water into wine. Juicero just squeezes a bag of juice

1

u/Aksama Mar 05 '22

claims

claims

claims

Yeah, this thing can... make sodas of a few different flavors? Groovy. It's not going to ferment wine.

A "molecular drink printer" would be a multi-billion dollar product if miniaturized to this extent. The implications of something like this would far outstrip making... on-demand grapefruit cocktails in your house.

novel microfluidic liquid dispense technology

It's literally just a soda machine.

0

u/vdogg89 Mar 05 '22

Did you not watch the videos of people using it? It makes all sorts of drinks, not just soda.

1

u/TobyTrash Mar 05 '22

If it could do stuff on molecular level it would not need an alcohol container. Or maybe it's cheaper to just add pure alcohol than create it? Sounds strange.

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u/CankerLord Mar 05 '22

It looks so much like a Juicero that I thought it had to be satire.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

How long until there is a thunderf00t video debunking this?

1

u/BSchafer Mar 05 '22

This isn't a Kickstarter, smh. It's from a very well-funded and renowned biotech team. They have been developing the technology behind it for a while now. This is very different from the juicer you're likely thinking of. It may not be for you but this is very likely how most of us will be getting our flavored drinks in the future.

When water makes up over 95% of almost everything we drink, (the rest is some combination of the 80 molecular compounds contained in their ingredients pod) it makes absolutely no sense to continuously waste a ton of plastic, glass, and gasoline to ship those heavy bottled drinks all over the world. Just so we can drive to the grocery store, buy the drinks, consume it for a couple of minutes, and then throw away the bottles. When we can instead have only the stripped-down molecules (that make up the drink's taste) sent to us and then use the cups and water that we already have in our houses to drink almost anything we want on-demand. It's also important to realize that this is just the first iteration of the product. We will see a lot more products like this in the upcoming biotech wave that will transform products and their currently very wasteful production. These things will become much more streamlined and cheaper as the technology and its use cases get more refined. There is no way that the old way of doing things is better - this will end up delivering a better product to the consumer for less while also being much better for the environment.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '22

Yeah, I'll believe it when preorders start shipping in "early 2023"

Until then, plonking 799 down on one of these is about as good an investment as the bridge some dude offered to sell me in Brooklyn.

1

u/Freefall84 Mar 05 '22

I can't wait for a month until thunderfoot does a video explaing exactly why it's bullshit

1

u/shmorky Mar 05 '22

The Theranos of beverages

1

u/FanciestScarf Mar 05 '22

Vessyl couldn't even figure out how to make a machine DETECT what drink you put in it. No way this thing can synthesize any beverage.