Walk into the headquarters of Cana in Redwood City, California and you are greeted by a towering, swirling sculpture made out of used aluminium cans and plastic bottles. It is an unsubtle monument to the problem that the three-year-old start-up reckons it is about to fix.
“The average American household consumes just over 2,500 bottles and cans a year. That’s what this is,” said Matt Mahar, Cana’s chief executive, gazing up at the 8ft pile of garbage. “And this is only a third of what it would be if we put the actual true amount. It’s pretty wild.”
Even wilder, perhaps, is his proposed solution. Cana has created what it calls the world’s first “molecular beverage printer” — a sleek-looking box about the size of a microwave oven that can, with the tap of a touchscreen, dispense hundreds of drinks, from cold-brew coffee to red wine, from orange juice to green tea and whisky.
The device is powered by some very clever science, of which more shortly. The goal: to obviate the need for all those cans and bottles generated by the $2 trillion (£1.5 trillion) global beverage industry — not to mention the immense resources required to fertilise and grow ingredients, and the pollution generated by moving products around the world. Mahar said: “It is the entire beverage aisle on your counter-top.”
The company has just emerged from years in “stealth mode”, in which it quietly blew through more than $30 million to invent what Mahar dubbed a “beverage creation platform”.
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As the fight against climate change intensifies, Silicon Valley has taken an increasingly expansive approach to the problems that need solving. Long gone are the days when the hottest ideas were electric cars and solar panels. A generation of companies is emerging to attack less obvious industries, from fertiliser and cement to meat production.
Indeed, much of the modern economy is centred on technologies that may be a century old but have simply been scaled up, ingraining into the economy inefficiencies and waste through antiquated processes that now need to be unwound.
The drinks industry, in Cana’s view, is no different. The sector produces an estimated 1 trillion cans and bottles each year, most of which end up in landfill. Raising the ingredients is resource-intensive: more than 670 gallons of water each day are required to grow, process and turn the ingredients into the beverages drunk by the typical American family.
The genesis of Cana can be traced back to Dave Friedberg. The former Google executive sold his weather data start-up Climate Corp to Monsanto for $1.1 billion in 2013. He has since set up The Production Board, a holding company where he incubates start-ups taking on problems that, if solved, could “reimagine Earth”.
A few years ago, he came across a 2011 paper from researchers led by Thomas Hofmann, a professor at the Technical University of Munich. Hofmann’s team used a high-powered chromatography machine to isolate about five dozen molecular compounds and odorants in a red wine; together, they are what make wine taste like wine. The researchers then “reconstructed” it from scratch by synthesising those ingredients, and combining water and alcohol.
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What if, Friedberg thought, they could do the same with other drinks — which, after all, are mostly water anyway? “The vast majority of drinks are 99 per cent water,” Friedberg told the Danny in the Valley podcast last year. “They are differentiated by about 1 per cent — just a couple of molecules. So the idea is, you can put those molecules in a printer, use water in your home, and you don’t have to bottle up and transport 20 trillion litres of water using carbon and plastic bottles around the world.”
The result is Cana. Its device works a bit like an inkjet printer. A cartridge, about the size of a textbook, has dozens of wells filled with different molecular compounds. Each well has a tiny micro-valve at the bottom. Choose, say, a green tea from the touchscreen and the machine ticks, spurts and burps into action. It plays the cartridge like a piano, titrating out tiny amounts of different compounds, mixing them with water, and then dispensing it into the glass. It also has a large container of ethanol for alcoholic drinks, caffeine for the coffee and a standard CO2 canister for fizzy beverages.
The green tea is, in fact, green tea. But it is also different. At the heart of Cana’s technology is the realisation that a core of key ingredients are the drivers of taste, nutrition and “mouthfeel” in most drinks that we consume. Green tea may contain more than 100 ingredients, but there are only a dozen that really matter to our palate.
Mahar said: “We figured out what all the universal ingredients are to allow us to create infinite different beverages. And we’re talking, like, microlitre amounts — one one-millionth of a litre, like a teardrop. You just tweak a little bit of that amount and you flip from a red wine to a white wine.”
The company has built just three of its Cana One printer prototypes and recently opened pre-orders in which punters can put down $99 to hold their place in a line — and then pay $500 when its product ships next year (in America, initially).
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Cana plans a per-drink charging model — 29 cents (17p) for simple spritzers up to $2.99 for cocktails. It will automatically send along cartridges free when the wells start to run dry. Friedberg predicted that the gadget could blow up the centralised manufacturing model of the global drinks business and “reduce the carbon footprint, energy, cost and time of the $2 trillion bottle beverage industry by at least ten times”.
To do that, though, the company has a lot to prove. Can the 55-person upstart actually scale up? Will its business model work? And most importantly, will people even want what Cana is selling?
The full price of the system will be $800, which leads to the most important question of all: are the drinks any good?
The company kitchen was blindingly white — walls, floors and counter-tops — save for a bright red accent wall. The atmosphere was cheerily tense. Five Cana employees — including Mahar, his chief of staff and the head of hardware — stood around as the machine boop-beeped out a stream of liquid the colour of wet earth. Cold-brew coffee. It was early, so I was keen.
I had a swig, and another. Silence and darting glances among the Cana folk. “Uh, well, that’s ... coffee,” I pronounced, reflecting on this fleeting glimpse into the life of a food critic. Relief rippled through the kitchen.
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The cold brew tasted like an ice coffee one might get at Starbucks. Not exquisite, but definitely a decent day starter or afternoon energiser. I tried three other drinks that were dispensed in quick succession: a sweet berry citrus concoction; a grapefruit sparkling water; and a mimosa-style cocktail (Mahar tuned it to 4 per cent alcohol, given the hour). Each came out within seconds from the same nozzle and, impressively, there were no traces of the coffee in my juice, no grapefruit in my cocktail.
It was all very slick. For a visiting journalist, these were, clearly, the drinks in which the company had the most confidence. Mahar said the machine could produce more than 200 different drinks, so I asked for a white wine. He demurred. “It hasn’t passed our beverage graduation process,” he said, explaining that until the lifestyle magazine Wine Spectator gives it a rating of 94, which is higher than for many store-bought brands, they won’t include it in the “catalogue” of 200 drinks on offer.
The company is continuing to tune the ingredients until it hits the mark. Beer and milk, which are more molecularly complex, will also not be part of the mix initially. By launch next year, however, Mahar expects the offering to expand to at least 500 different drinks. Long term, the possibilities, he said, are “infinite”.
