REDWOOD CITY, Calif., USA – Cana is launching Cana One, the world’s first molecular beverage printer. Cana One prints thousands of beverages on your kitchen countertop – from juice, soft drinks and iced coffee, to hard seltzers, wine, and cocktails – without the need for plastic, aluminum, glass or other wasteful containers.
Cana One, which sits on a kitchen countertop, offers unique discovery experiences, novel brands, and options for every lifestyle or preference. Customers use Cana’s touchscreen display to explore, discover, and create their perfect drink from thousands of beverage types and brands. Customers can personalize every beverage to their preferred levels of alcohol, caffeine, or sugar, customizing beverages for breakfast, post-workout, dinner, or relaxation.
“Cana One is designed to give each customer convenience, savings, and an experience they didn’t know they were craving – while cleaning up the planet,” said Cana CEO Matt Mahar, whose team includes Nike, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Google, Apple and food tech alumni. “It’s like having a personalized beverage aisle in your kitchen – with zero trash or hassle from plastic, aluminum, and glass containers.”
Maximum variety, minimum waste
Unlike pod-based beverage systems, a single Cana One ingredient cartridge can create hundreds of different beverages and should last on average for a month without needing replacement. The device comes with parental controls including a PIN code to keep certain beverages (including alcoholic and caffeinated options) away from others in the home.
Ingredient cartridges will be automatically replaced, at no additional cost to customers, as they run low. Customers easily return cartridges to Cana in prepaid packaging, where they are reused up to 12 times before being fully recycled.
Customers pay per drink for each beverage Cana makes. Per-drink pricing will range from $0.29 to $2.99; the average cost will be significantly lower than bottled beverage retail prices.
Customers can reserve their Cana One device today for $99, which will convert to a credit toward purchase. The first 10,000 orders are guaranteed a price of $499. After that, the regular price will be $799. The reservation fee is refundable at any time, and customers will have the opportunity to review the final product features closer to its ship date, before committing to a purchase.
Cana expects first shipments to go out in early 2023, based on current visibility into its supply chain.
Message in a bottle: Beverages are trashing the planet
More people are waking up to the fact that the global beverage and bottling industry is one of the most wasteful and irresponsible – drying up freshwater supplies, fueling carbon emissions and turbocharging the global trash crisis.
To make a single liter of orange juice takes 40 liters of water to irrigate the orange tree. To make a single bottle of wine takes over 600 liters of water to grow the grapes.
The $2 trillion beverage and bottling industry uses over 100 million acres of land, requires hundreds of trillions of liters of water, and emits 543 million tons of CO2 to produce over 1 trillion single-use plastic, glass, and aluminum beverage containers each year – and most of these bottles are filled almost to the brim with mostly water.
The industry spends energy to produce, process, and bottle these containers of largely water, then moves them around in petrol-guzzling ships and trucks to climate-controlled warehouses, grocery stores, and ultimately our homes. People try to recycle – but recycling uses lots of energy, and two-thirds of our plastic ends up in landfills nonetheless.
Cana will eliminate the need for more than 100 beverage containers per month for the typical American household. At scale, Cana aims to eliminate the use of plastic and glass containers, water waste, and the CO2 emissions used in global beverage manufacturing and distribution. In addition, Cana would eliminate the time-sucking chore of buying, storing, disposing and recycling cans, bottles, and other containers in your home.
“Instead of making insignificant, incremental improvements to the beverage industry’s archaic systems, Cana accelerates the shift to clean, decentralized manufacturing and brings an incredibly fun product to your home,” said Cana Chairman Bharat Vasan. “Any beverage you want, any time, with ultra-low waste – that’s what people and the planet deserve.”
Science in every sip
Cana’s team spent three years studying what we drink at the molecular level, commercializing breakthrough research in flavor and analytical chemistry.
Cana scientists identified and isolated the specific trace compounds that drive flavor and aroma for thousands of unique commercially available beverages. They created the world’s first universal beverage ingredient set, which recreates thousands of different drinks using a simplified set of ingredients that can be printed out of a long-lasting ingredient cartridge.
Cana engineers designed, tested, and have now demonstrated a novel microfluidic liquid dispense technology that can affordably, quickly, and accurately combine Cana’s individual flavoring ingredients in a small form factor, delivering a better beverage than the commercially available bottled options.
Cana is building a technology platform to create all household consumables at the point of consumption, with minimal environmental impact. Cana’s goal is to eliminate the need for bottling, packaging, shipping and other manufacturing waste.
