If you live in Atlanta, Salt Lake City, or Orange County, you may see new Coca-Cola dispensers over the summer in McDonalds and other places. Dubbed “Freestyle,” these machines appear to stand pretty tall but will allow for up to 100 varieties of sodas, teas, juices, and flavored waters to be made.

For Coca-Cola, it means they can better serve us, which means more money for them. The Freestyle machines will be accessible to the company wirelessly, allowing them to pull data from and push data to it. So they can see, for example, that flavored water is growing in demand and quickly be able to react by pushing new flavors to the machines.

This also helps them localize their drinks, so they can see that Japan likes this drink, but the U.S. likes that drink. Or Los Angeles likes this, but New York likes that. With this data, fast-food chains can better serve us.

In addition, these new machines also allows Coca-Cola and outlets ensure their locations stay stocked. Freestyle easily captures how much is being used of what, and refilling is as simple as adding ink to a printer. To create the dozens of different combination’s they are capable of producing, these dispensers utilize 30 highly concentrated cartridges, meaning each drink only requires a few drops.

Companies being able to react quickly to market changes benefits everyone in the end so I guess it isn’t really a bad thing is it?

Photo taken from pitch.com