Molecular Beverage Printing with Matt Mahar, CEO of Cana

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Matt, CEO of Cana, and they discuss how Cana has built a molecular beverage printer capable of dispensing any drink imaginable on demand, how decentralizing beverage manufacturing will have a significant and immediate impact on the environment, and what the future could look like with most foods and drinks able to be printed in your home. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Matt at 00:00:36) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Matt, my mind is blown, my friend. I have learned about this. This is the craziest thing in the world. I didn't believe it was true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:58) And then my producer sent me a video of some guy actually showing the physical machine and testing it and trying it. And yeah, I guess we should just start there. What is this thing that you've built?

(Matt at 00:01:10) So the team at Cana, we built the world's first molecular beverage printer. And the way you should think about it is it's the beverage aisle on your countertop. It can produce thousands of different beverages on demand, and you can personalize those beverages. And it uses the water that's in your home. And it combines the water that's in your home with a whole bunch of different molecules, or what we call just ingredients, from a couple different cartridges that fit inside that molecular beverage printer. And so that's what we've been able to do. That's the crazy unlock. Water in your home plus the ingredients in our machine can produce thousands of different types of beverages.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:58) So these ingredients, how many of them are there?

(Matt at 00:02:01) Yeah, good question. So the background there, roughly three years ago, our Chief Science Officer, Lance Kaiser, found some research around another professor that had done some work on analyzing a red wine and reducing that red wine, the ingredients down in that red wine. And red wine is a complex beverage. It has 400 plus different ingredients. That's what gives it its aroma and its taste and its mouth feel. The natural fermentation process results in some complex tastes and aromas, right? But this professor was really awesome. His background's chemical engineering. He essentially reduced those 400 down to about 40. So that's the kind of ratio that you're dealing with. And when he reduced it to 40, he taste tested it, and no one could tell the difference between the two different types. And so what we've done is we picked up the research Lance did at Cana and essentially recreated that same experiment and was just as successful. And in the process, Lance's background is a chemical engineer, and he has a really good idea of what types of molecules or ingredients are needed to create any beverage. And so when he saw the 40 that were in the wine, he's like, you know what? I can use those same ingredients to create a soda, right? Like a cola, or the same ingredients to create an orange juice. And so he went and did the same analysis on a bunch of different beverages, and he realized that there's a set of about 150 unique compounds that allow us to create any beverage in the world and infinite different variations of it. So it's about 150 based on the ability to analyze and understand what's in there and then reduce down and recreate a beverage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:56) That's crazy. Can you give me an example of one of these compounds?

(Matt at 00:04:00) Yeah, for sure. A couple. So I mean, sugar, like sucrose, is in a lot of our drinks, so that's in there. Tartaric acid, citric acid. We add vitamin C, so we fortify beverages as well, so we have ascorbic acid in there. Another one, maybe a better example for coffee. We have caffeine, obviously, is another ingredient that's in coffee and tea. But in coffee, there's this ingredient called quinic acid that gives coffee its bitter taste. And so we have that in there as well, and we just tweak the amount of quinic acid that goes into a coffee, and it changes the coffee from light to medium to dark roast to even to tea. The same ingredient is used in tea. So there's a whole bunch of ingredients in that. And now we call it the universal set of beverage ingredients, and it's an ingredient cartridge. That's where the 150 live.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:54) I get it too because I'm a fan of cooking, right, and baking. And there's a handful of components, and you can make just a huge variety of desserts. But yeah, I love what you guys are doing. And how did you get drawn into this? How did you get pulled into this?

(Matt at 00:05:15) Yeah. So I've been here about a year and a half as the CEO, and I met Bharat Vasan, who is the president and CEO at a company called The Production Board. And The Production Board is a, think of them as a VC meets an incubator kind of smashed together. They're run by a guy named David Friedberg. And essentially what they do is, their thesis is that we have all the molecules we need on Earth and we don't need to all go to Mars and live there. We just need better modes of production on Earth. And they apply that to agriculture and health and all kinds of different categories. And so Dave and Lance, Lance Kaiser, again, our Chief Science Officer, was also working at The Production Board at the time. That research that I mentioned before, they came across that together. And when they, after they did a little of that work I explained where they ran the analysis, they started to think about how they could commercialize this company. They're like, well, can we, that's a better way to produce beverages. It reduces environmental impact. And they started to, what The Production Board does at that point is when they have deep tech or science, they put some resources on it and solve the core problem. And then once they get through that core problem of the deep technology or the deep, I guess, engineering or the deep science challenge, and they think they can commercialize it, that's when they start to bring in and they round out the team. So they had spent about three years before I got here creating amazing tasting beverages and automating the system. So think of it as we run an analysis, we print a beverage, we taste test it, and we just do that thousands and thousands of times to get really good tasting beverages. We're really hydrated over here at Cana. And so once they got that system down, they started to look for people that could take this company to market. And whenever you have a company that is coming from a true kind of technology breakthrough perspective, you gotta figure out who's the customer, how do you brand it, how do you design a molecular printer, how do you hire the team? And so that's when, I had known Bharat from my previous, I worked at EA Sports and video games, and I had known Bharat from my EA days. And he just reached out and said, hey, we're doing something so freaking incredible. You're not even gonna believe it. And I know you're, you know, you always are thinking sustainability first and you want to have an impact with your work. You should come check this out. And so I did, and I had a similar reaction to you, which was, I don't even know, I don't even understand what you're saying. And then when they showed it to me and explained how it worked, I thought to myself, this is truly a huge leap, and I want to be part of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:04) I went through so many stages of disbelief. So first I heard it audibly. It explained to me what it was. I was like, no. I was like, alright, this is clearly, some, you know, maybe they have a prototype or a graphic design of what it could look like. And then they started showing me and sharing the videos and I'm like, it exists in the videos. It's not a 3D render in the videos. I'm like, so it's actually existing. And then I did watch several videos today of those people that did the VC startup thing, and they'll talk about it, how they had been incubating it for three years. And it all makes sense. And it's pretty cool. And I just want to know, why don't I have one right now?

(Matt at 00:08:43) Yeah, fair enough. Fair question. Yeah. So we're pretty close, right? So what you saw was our prototype. We have a couple of those prototypes and fully functioning. In the product world, we call it a looks like and works like prototype. So it's the real deal. Everything that's inside of there, the size, the materials are pretty close. And it's just a, what we're building is complicated, and it's never been done before. This is, you know, this isn't, there's not off the shelf molecular printer parts, right? We're creating some things here. So, you know, we have taken our time to make sure that it performs really well. But we're on that path right now. We're actually just finishing up our second set of prototypes, and we'll be entering into manufacturing here in the summer. And so our target though to ship this is in about 12 months is when we'll actually have these out. And if you've preordered, then, you know, you'll be getting yours in about 12 months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:42) Yeah. I wasn't gonna preorder, and then I found out that it's several hundred dollars cheaper if you preorder.

(Matt at 00:09:48) And

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:48) so I was like, guys, we're buying one for the office. We're buying one for the studio. If I'm gonna have people to the studio, come on, man. It's Modern CTO Podcast. I have to have a molecular beverage printer.

(Matt at 00:10:00) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:01) What studio would be complete without it?

(Matt at 00:10:02) Yeah. You have a molecular beverage printer. I mean, you know, we talk about it on the engineering side a lot of what got me hooked at the very beginning was that it's a Star Trek replicator, right? This is truly the first step to being able to recreate anything from its, you know, component parts on demand. So that's awesome that you, yeah, you should get one for the office, and it'll be there in mid of 2026.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:32) Yeah. I bet you this whole shutdown and the coronavirus has pushed your pipeline back, right, or your development time back, because I mean, the manufacturers are overloaded or shut down.

(Matt at 00:10:44) Yeah. There's a lot of things there. I mean, the one was, you know, we're doing two things that are super hands on. You gotta make beverages, and that's all hands on, right? There's flavor scientists and chemists and analytical chemists all working on the beverages, and then we have a whole host of engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, embedded software. And so all that is really hands on. And so when the pandemic hit, I hadn't even joined the company yet actually at the time, but it slowed down. So yeah, if I look at the old dates, it should have actually, you know, been pretty close to shipping right now, but it's only because we just, people couldn't come in the office for a year. And in California, there were some pretty strict restrictions around who could be in the office and who couldn't. But anyway, what's been good is we've been able to speed up, and we're getting more momentum. And, you know, we don't, I don't know what the future of, the supply chains are all messed up. I don't know what the future of it looks like, but we're in a good spot. As far in the future as we can see, you know, we've got all the right long lead parts, you know, teed up and ready to go. So again, this is a matter of us making sure that we really test this product a lot before we let it get to your studio.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:08) Yeah. Because you definitely want to handle the durability aspect. You know, they dropped the iPhone 10,000 times, right, before they release it. So you definitely have to put some miles on it so people are gonna love the product, right? Because the last thing you'd want is to push it out early and everybody get it and it not work as you would imagine it to.

(Matt at 00:12:25) Absolutely. I mean, you're talking about beverages. You're talking about something you're drinking every day. You can't mess around with that. So our tactic is, let's really do a really smart rollout of this product. Let's not run in and say we're gonna do millions of these units. It's like, let's scale this up properly. So actually, the end of this year, the end of 2022, we'll be piloting. And so we'll be piloting in select spots. We'll be stressing the entire system. But essentially, there's three things that we're always gonna do with our product, right? It's gotta dispense drinks really quickly. It's gotta dispense drinks, or the liquids, really accurately, and it has to do those consistently. And so those are the three things that we're testing for across our product all the time. Our engineering team, you mentioned the iPhone being dropped. Ours is not, we're not dropping it. But it's similar is we have, there's some mechanical moving parts in there, and we're essentially, you know, opening and closing and moving those parts, you know, hundreds and thousands and thousands and thousands of times. And we're doing thousands of dispenses of beverages from the device all the time. And not only to stress the device, but also to taste test.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:46) That's awesome. That is so cool, man. So do you have one at your house?

(Matt at 00:13:50) I have had one at my house. So as I said, there's only a couple of these molecular printers in the world. And right, the phase we're in right now is we really need our engineering team to continue their progress, right? They've significantly derisked the, you know, the majority of the engineering parts, as well as the science, the beverage tasting. But we've used a lot of the devices for that. I've had one in my house just to more of a consumer kind of mindset perspective. Use it, understand how it changes my behavior, how it impacted my thinking. And then we've got one in, we have a kitchen obviously in our office here, but our kitchen is just a demo kitchen. And so we call it the kitchen of the future, and there's a Cana One device in there that we use that's fully functioning. And, you know, if you ever came and visited, you could, you know, could take you through there and you can try it out and see it. But yeah, I have only for three days I got to take it home, but now it's just back here in the kitchen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:48) That is awesome. So where's the limitations of this thing?

(Matt at 00:14:53) They're pretty, it's pretty far ranging actually. So what we've created is we've created a system that allows us to dispense any type of liquid. And the magic of that is the ingredients that I talked about and knowing what ingredients gotta be mixed at what ratio, and then also the system that we use to dispense those quickly and accurately, right? And so essentially, we just started with beverages. There really is not a lot of limitation in terms of the technology at its core. From a first principles perspective, we can do any type of liquid, anything that's water soluble at this point. And we have a really clear path to be able to, probably within five to ten years, do yogurts and cookies and that kind of zone. So the technology is pretty far ranging. I know it probably sounds a bit nuts to be like, am I gonna get some food printed out of this thing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:56) Print me some cookies, man.

(Matt at 00:15:57) Yeah. But

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:59) I'm just gonna open my mouth under the cookie machine. Feed the cookies.

(Matt at 00:16:01) Hey, listen. If they've got that nice, you know, chewy center, right, and chocolate chip, who doesn't want one of those? So there's a path for us to do that.

(Matt at 00:16:12) It's pretty impressive actually what the team is working on, even in our first generation of product. So first generation will do every beverage that you need from a cold brew coffee to a sports drink to a functional drink to juices, sodas, flavored seltzers, carbonated water, cocktails, wine. There's just a few things that it won't do. We're not going to do hot beverages in the first one. And the reason why is because at our core, we're about reducing the environmental impact of beverage creation, the way that we centrally create it now.

(Matt at 00:16:50) And the biggest impact that we can have is by eliminating the plastic bottle waste. And most of that waste comes from cold beverages, right? The stuff that people are drinking in their home now is mostly cold. You know, it's beers, it's wine, it's sports drinks. It's that kind of stuff that's causing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:06) She buys bottles of water, and then she buys these little packages. She tears them open and puts them in the bottle of water and shakes it. And then we just end up having a ton of plastic bottles.

(Matt at 00:17:18) Yeah. So our goal is, let's have the biggest impact we possibly can in reducing the bottles and cans that get used to ship our beverages from point A to point B, and that's mostly cold to start, and then we'll lean into hot beverages in our second gen device.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:36) So has Coca-Cola called you up and been like, what's going on, bro?

(Matt at 00:17:42) Yeah. We've had a lot of interest, I would say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:45) Yeah. That's the PR way to say it. Yeah.

(Matt at 00:17:48) We've had a lot of interest. But, you know, what's interesting, I'll say this too, the brands that we've talked to, the brands that people know and love, they have been, from my perspective, more open than I initially thought that they were going to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:04) Because they can still make their money. Right? From what I understood, you don't pay for the cartridge, you pay for the drink. So if Red Bull can push Red Bull through your platform and they can still make their money, they're going to move from having a board meeting about assassinating you to becoming your best friend.

(Matt at 00:18:21) Right? Yeah. That's one way. Yeah. I mean, you could look at us and essentially, we're a new channel for existing beverage brands.

(Matt at 00:18:30) We're on someone's countertop, and that's a super attractive thing for these businesses. But I'll also say, from a sustainability perspective, they understand what consumers want. They're at least listening. Right? They're understanding that consumers of every age are saying, whatever brand that I buy my stuff from, can be consumables, can be shoes, can be shirts. I just want to know that that company cares about Mother Nature and that the way that they're producing their products is in a sustainable fashion. And so some of these companies, I mean, that's not how they were formed. Right? Go back a hundred years to some of these big beverage companies. That wasn't the topic.

(Matt at 00:19:16) That wasn't the thing. It was just scale, scale, more and more, and they didn't think of water waste or CO2 emissions or bottle or can waste. And so here we come along with taking the sustainability-first approach and, you know, they know that at the end of the day, the consumer decides. And so consumers don't want companies that are impacting the environment. So we're a great way for them to bring that positioning for their company and that impact to their business without them having to do a ton of investment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:49) No, it's pretty cool. I'm not a super—like, I love—I'm a human, and I love Earth. And I definitely want to have clean water, and I want things to work well. And when I see all the plastic in the ocean, I'm like, somebody hurry up with those microbial things that are going to eat it. Right? Who doesn't want their home to be clean and nice? But when I saw all the plastic in the video and I thought about it, the problem with me processing this is it can literally take out what, 70% of the bottles of water that people are converting to other things or shipping? It affects so many different things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:35) Right? Because you have the freight to ship the water. You have the cleaning of the—you have the manufacturing of the plastic. You have all of these things on top. And then you have the other part of the chain, which is the companies, right, that are doing the commerce in order to generate that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:50) And there's just so many areas, and then you put this machine in front of you, and you're just like, that is way better. That's smarter.

(Matt at 00:20:59) Yeah. Absolutely. I think, you know, if you look at the centralized model now, you grow all the ingredients. You have to water and irrigate them. You've got to load all those ingredients, those raw ingredients onto transport.

(Matt at 00:21:15) You get that to a factory. They've got to get processed. There's more water that gets used in the processing. Then you start bottling. Right?

(Matt at 00:21:24) And then once you're done bottling and packaging, you put those on cars and trucks, planes, whatever. You fly them and drive them around, you're emitting CO2. And then what ends up, I think, kind of sucking about the whole thing is that you and I as consumers, you know, I want a beverage, my hard kombucha, and then at the end of the day though, I'm the one holding the empty bottle. And then, I know where I live now, I can recycle the plastic. But where I moved from, you couldn't.

(Matt at 00:21:59) The county wasn't even accepting plastic bottles at the time. Just throw them in the garbage. They're ending up in the landfill. So through that process, you have CO2 emissions, you have water waste, and you have the consumer as a result of it kind of get left holding the bag with all this packaging waste. So what we asked ourselves when we first started this, started the research with Lance three years ago was like, okay, if we can recreate beverages from just a little bit, from just the 40, you know, key ingredients as an example with wine, and could we concentrate those down to the level where we can create hundreds and hundreds of servings of that single beverage.

(Matt at 00:22:27) Right? And that allows us to eliminate around 80% of the packaging and bottling waste. It's about a hundred bottles and cans a month we can eliminate from someone's home as a result of them using Cana. We can significantly reduce the water waste because we're not contributing to—you don't have to create any of the—you don't have to grow anything.

(Matt at 00:23:08) You don't have to process it. You don't have to wash the bottle before they stick the label on it at the factory. That doesn't exist anymore because all the labels and stuff are digital. Right? It's all on a screen on the device.

(Matt at 00:23:20) And then we're not shipping around heavy containers that only produce one beverage. We're shipping a cartridge that produces over a month's worth of beverages. And so we flipped that equation from one to one—one bottle, one beverage—to one cartridge equals hundreds of beverages. So we're removing, yeah, about 80% across the board of those three categories.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:46) Is the alcoholic drinks actually alcoholic, or do they just taste like the alcoholic drink?

(Matt at 00:23:51) No, they're actually alcohol. So, yeah, this is the—if you're in a frat house, this is the party molecular printer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:59) Do you have a party add-on where you—how much alcohol is in that cylinder, though?

(Matt at 00:24:06) Yeah. So the goal for us is to have everything last about a month. So we ship people a couple different cartridges. There's the ingredient cartridge. That's the magic, that universal set of beverage ingredients.

(Matt at 00:24:16) That is thousands of different beverages across all those different categories I mentioned before. And then we have a spirits cartridge, which you're asking about. We have CO2 if people want to carbonate their drinks. And then we have a sugar cartridge because we put a lot of sugar in beverages in general.

(Matt at 00:24:36) So we have a separate cartridge for that. So all those cartridges get shipped to somebody. We know exactly how much is in the cartridge, I should say. So we only ship it exactly when you need it. This isn't like a subscribe and save thing where stuff just piles up on your doorstep.

(Matt at 00:24:52) Right? We get it there only when you need it. But to your question, we want all of that to last about a month. So we're still figuring out the exact amount of alcohol in there, but it's about a handle—like, 1.75 liters. And so that's what we use.

(Matt at 00:25:08) It's a neutral grain spirit, very similar to the way that alcohol is made now. Right? You know, if you and I started a liquor company, a spirits company, you could start it for your company. You essentially call someone up who's a distiller and you're like, hey. I want to make this type of alcohol.

(Matt at 00:25:27) They take a neutral grain spirit. They color it and they flavor it, and then they call it whatever you want to call it, bourbon or whiskey or whatever. And so we use the same ingredients that are already in the supply chains and already in the beverages that we're consuming. We just combine it with different ingredients in a different way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:45) If you don't drink, can you opt out of the cartridge?

(Matt at 00:25:49) Yeah. Totally. 100%. Yeah. That's actually an interesting point.

(Matt at 00:25:53) One of the things I'm guessing is a macro trend as well. I've seen even before I worked at Cana, it's just like alcohol consumption in general is trending down, and the consumer that's purchasing—that our product is resonating with—is that consumer that's a little more aware of the impacts of alcohol and sugar on their body. And they really like the idea that they can adjust the amount of sugar or alcohol or just not have alcohol at all. So if you don't want alcohol, you don't have to have it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:23) Yeah. Yeah. I maybe have three or four drinks a year. I don't drink a lot. I did in my twenties.

(Matt at 00:26:33) And then how times have changed. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:36) You can not drink and have kids. I mean, it's not a fun thing being hungover with screaming kids. Yeah. But I like this. I'm going to preorder one before we get a little bit farther in the conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:51) Where can people go to preorder this?

(Matt at 00:26:54) So Cana.com—go to Cana.com, C-A-N-A.com, and you can preorder right now. It's $99 reservation fee. And that reservation fee gets you the Cana One device for $499 when it comes out. And the regular price is $799.

(Matt at 00:27:12) Now that $499 price is limited to the first 10,000 people that preorder, and we're getting close. So if you're hearing this, I would say if you're sitting on the fence or you just want to do it, now is the time because we're getting pretty close to hitting our cap.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:31) Yeah. I'm definitely the early adopter type. When I see something that makes sense, I'm like, we should at least have one. Right? It's just the future, and I like to support the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:43) And it's great that it also helps the environment and all of that stuff too. So there's just a lot of wins. That's probably why you joined this project. You were doing your thing at Nike. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:55) And then you got over here and, this is just a really neat project, man.

(Matt at 00:28:01) Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty fantastic. Yeah. There's a lot to like.

(Matt at 00:28:03) I think there's a lot of things to like, and it's a big step. This is a new category that we're creating of decentralized beverage manufacturing. And so there's a lot to be excited about. The thing for me personally is just I really love the idea of reducing the environmental impact and just, you know, doing the most we can with technology and science to prolong our use of the Earth and use of our natural resources.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:36) Now do you think that this is a thing that kids will be using too or just the parents? Is there locks on it? How does that all work?

(Matt at 00:28:46) Yeah. Yeah. Another good question. Yeah. As a parent myself, that's one of the first things that you think about as, okay, who can get access to the stuff in here? So it's actually—I think it's way more secure. What we have is more secure than what exists in the house now. I mean, someone can go buy some beers and they're just in the fridge. They're just sitting there.

(Matt at 00:29:04) Your kids can just open the fridge and get access or whatever your spirits are in a cupboard probably. And so what we do is all of our stuff is—so first of all, you've got to be 21 to just get alcohol. So when you buy your Cana One and you check out and you say, yeah, I want alcohol, we've got to verify. So we verify there, then the stuff gets shipped to you and the courier verifies too.

(Matt at 00:29:24) Got to look and be like, all right, Joel's 21. Cool. Here's your cartridge. If you're not, they take it back. And then once it's at the device, you've got to get through those two pieces as well. Once it's in the device, so you put the cartridge in the device, when you go and set up, you create a profile. So it's like, Joel—oh, yeah. That's right.

(Matt at 00:29:42) We verified your age. We got your driver's license. Looks like you probably want alcohol. Cool. If you don't, you can flip it.

(Matt at 00:29:48) You can turn it off. And you create other profiles for other people at the same time. So you might be like, daughter, click, or son, click, and you can just say no alcohol, no caffeine. And so when they go to use it, they just select from their profile, tap on their profile image, and then they have access to only the set of beverages that you want them to have access to. So you could eliminate soda.

(Matt at 00:30:10) You could eliminate whatever you want, and they can only get, I don't know, vitamin C enriched orange juice or something. And so we have all those layers at the device, but if it's you, let's say, and you go up and you're going to have one of your three drinks a year and you just go up and tap and you hit, let's say you hit a cocktail, it'll just ask you to punch in a four-digit code. And so we also just verify right at the very end, just in case maybe your profile didn't get logged out in time and someone comes and clicks it. They still got to know your code.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:41) Okay. That's pretty cool. And so, all right, I know you're new product and everything, but I'm just going to go—because my background is product development. Okay. So you are doing profiles, which the next thing that comes up is personalization. You've drank these drinks. You might also like these drinks. Have you guys gotten there yet, or is it going to be something that you make once you have a ton of data from everybody using it?

(Matt at 00:31:07) So we are—this is going to be the most personalized beverage experience in the world. Think of it as your own barista and mixologist on demand. So you can select from, you know, let's say it's cold brew coffee. You can adjust the intensity of any of the ingredients that are onboard the device, onboard the Cana One. So you can adjust the amount of caffeine that goes into that cold brew coffee.

(Matt at 00:31:36) You can adjust the—so what we'll ship with is our Cana version of cold brew coffee, which we think is, you know, it's like a dark roast, and it's got chocolate notes, let's say. Right? You may drink that, but you're like, that's awesome. I'm going to leave it. I love that.

(Matt at 00:31:52) Or you're like, you know what, I really want to dial up vanilla, or I want to add a little bit of mocha, or I want to dial up the amount of caffeine. You can do all of that on your own, and then you can save that to your profile. So the next time you come back, and if you do that a couple of times, we also know, okay, it looks like Joel's digging this coffee in the morning between these hours. So when he comes back and taps the device on and clicks his profile, the first thing he's going to see at the top of what we call our suggestion tray.

(Matt at 00:32:21) But at the very top, you're going to see cold brew coffee and you just tap and it's done. Actually, there's a button you just press and hold down for a quick pour. You don't have to go through the steps once you kind of know the system. So we'll have an insanely personalized experience for people within days, and then you can personalize and adjust on the go. So think of it as personalized recommendations based on what you've drank, but then also you can personalize the beverage yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:50) Can I make one and share it with my friends, or can it go viral? Can my beverage trend?

(Matt at 00:32:56) Now we're talking. That's the future. So that's exactly what we want to do. Cana is going to have an interesting take on beverage brands. And so we're going to invite the beverage brands that people know and love now onto the platform, but we're also going to have some really unique partners. And our goal is to turn YouTube creators, influencers of the world, people that already have a brand, turn them into beverage brand owners. It shouldn't just be for the A-list of the A-list of the A-list people here that have their tequila brand or their whiskey brand.

(Matt at 00:33:39) And so now people can come onto our platform and they can create any beverage. And we have a process, though. We step them through internal. It's a service we provide completely for free. We create a beverage for somebody. So we've announced a few of the partners that we're working with on our website, like Simone Giertz as an example. She is going to have her own beverage on our platform. We've worked with her.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:01) What does she do?

(Matt at 00:34:02) So Simone Giertz, if you're not familiar, she does really bad robots. And so she's got a crazy awesome YouTube following. She's an engineer, like a really great engineer, and she makes really goofy robots, like robots that will pour cereal. And she videos the routine going through her process of building the robot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:29) Oh, nice.

(Matt at 00:34:30) Yeah. It's just amazing. She's got millions and millions of followers. And if you're an engineer, you've probably heard of her, and her videos are just spot on because she explains, like, okay, I tried to use this type of system, and I used whatever, a six-axis accelerometer to understand up and down and it didn't quite work. She's actually a really skilled engineer and explains kind of what's happening. And she's really awesome. So check her out. But she has drinks throughout the day when she's in her shop working on stuff. And so we're creating a beverage with her and going to bring it to market. We want her to be the most successful beverage brand owner that she can be. And she has her own unique following, and she knows what's going to resonate with them. But eventually, all the things that we're using internally to help her make her beverage, we want to turn over, like you were just asking, we want to turn over to just the everyday person and have them create a beverage.

(Matt at 00:35:27) Say it's New Year's and you want to create a really interesting beverage for New Year's and share it and have it trend. But we've got to just put the right guardrails on there because we don't want beverages just not tasting good on the platform. And so we've got to make sure we put the right type of rails and guidelines around people that want to create them. But eventually we'll get there. Joel, your dream will come true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:52) Okay. What other things am I not asking or what else should we be talking about here with this product?

(Matt at 00:35:58) I think we've almost hit on everything. We talked about the personalization. We talked about the recommendations. I think one of the other really interesting things that we're doing is, did I mention that our technology is applicable to all kinds of different types of liquids?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:13) Yeah. But we didn't go too deep into it. So what are some of the crazy examples that aren't beverages?

(Matt at 00:36:21) Yeah. Essentially, we're going to become the liquid dispensing technologists of the world. We'll become the most known, and we'll become experts in it if we aren't already, actually. And so it starts with beverages, and then it goes to milks, and then it goes to dairy. And then that beverage line just continues down the road. There's a lot of things we can do there.

(Matt at 00:36:49) And then my guess, or yeah, how I envision it is probably in about ten years, we're also doing food. So I mentioned you start to get into dairy products and there's yogurts. You start to get into cheeses. You start to get into stuff like that. That's probably the first path. And our technology is applicable there, both on the engineering side, like the molecular printer, but also on the science side where we have an automated system that can scan what's in a beverage or a food, and it can print it really quickly, and then we can taste test. That's essentially how it works in three steps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:22) Well, that's cool.

(Matt at 00:37:23) Yeah. But that whole automation system, actually, the way people should think about it is it's like a computer vision pipeline. Go back a decade and people were scanning faces or whatever, cars, and that was training the algorithm to know that's a car, that's a car, or that's not a car, which is just as important. Ours is essentially the same. We scan beverages, and then we print them and we say, oh, that's a Pinot Noir. That's a Pinot Noir. That's a Pinot Noir through our testing with humans.

(Matt at 00:37:51) We also have automated some of the testing. So we also have built some instrumentation that mimics how humans would taste and smell beverages, and so that system can become faster. So there's some really interesting engineering and technology we're applying there. But the future path of what is possible is, I mean, this can do soap, sanitizers, detergents. This can be something that you essentially get every household consumable out of, not just your beverages. So our goal, our vision, is every liquid-based household consumable should come from a Cana device.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:30) Yeah. But it would be a little awkward getting my laundry detergent from the same place.

(Matt at 00:38:35) Yeah. You're like, yeah, hey Matt, here's your soda. And then listen, I've got to just do a load of laundry. I'm just going to get some soap out of here. No. You would have two different devices.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:46) You would have your Cana drinking machine. You would have your Cana synthetic whatever machine.

(Matt at 00:38:53) Yeah. You have a separate device for, you know, it's pumping out shaving cream. It's a totally separate device we would have for sure, separate device. But to give you an idea of the different types of liquids that we could do, it's pretty very, very broad, and beverages are just the first line that we want to go after. Again, it's about eliminating packaging and bottle waste, and detergents are just as guilty as anybody of having those single-use plastic containers when you're done, not being able to do anything with them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:21) And you're the CEO, correct?

(Matt at 00:39:23) That's right. That's correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:24) So I have a talent question for you. I got to do a cool interview with someone from Boeing a while back and they were talking to me about advancements in the avionics and all this industry. And one of the cool things that they had done or that was happening was that these giant 3D printers that they could actually print these airplane parts versus building them centrally and shipping them. And they were working all the licensing out and doing all of those types of things. My question is, with that in mind, has it been hard to find talent in the sort of 3D printing world, or is there enough of a foundation with the 3D printing that exists out there already today that there was enough talent there for you guys?

(Matt at 00:40:12) I'd say kind of down the middle, like a little bit of a mix of both. And so the challenge for us is 3D printing. But I think when you boil down 3D printing, at least the way that we interpret it, it's like an electromechanical challenge. You've got a lot of software driving a lot of mechanical parts, and that's just hard. That's some of the gnarliest engineering problems to solve. And so where we've had success is people that have worked on robotics, people that have worked on some 3D printing, even inkjet printing. And that's where we've been able to find success. And then we have had people from biotech as well because we're dealing with chemicals and we're dealing with those chemicals being stored in cartridges. We found people that have worked in that biotech space where they're used to mostly chemicals from humans, but also they're being very sensitive to what they come in contact with.

(Matt at 00:41:12) So we've had to pull from some really interesting places. Our company is really diverse. And then you've got that kind of type of DNA, then you've got your embedded software people and your mechanical engineers and your electrical engineers because we're building this device.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:25) You have great designers. I love the brand, both the physical device, which is a separate typical design philosophy and whatnot, and then the digital design. I mean, you guys nailed it on both fronts.

(Matt at 00:41:39) Oh, well, thanks. Yeah. We appreciate that. Yeah. So fantastic designers. And then you have an entire other side of the house, which is all the flavor scientists, the chemists, the analytical chemists. Because our system, again, is a pipeline of beverage creation, and we're inventing and creating an automated beverage system. High throughput. We want it to be super high throughput, and we want it to be able, like I said, to scan some beverages, print some beverages, test beverages, and do that thousands of times in a day or a week to be able to get to the conclusion that this is the best-tasting version of that beverage or the best-tasting version of whatever consumable we're printing out, and just go through that as quickly as possible. So we kind of have a really interesting technology group broadly speaking across all of Cana.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:31) And tell me if I'm wrong because I know we're close to time here, so I just want to get this one last question answered. So I'm thinking about it as the drinks that we would make or the drinks I'm going to find, they're going to sort of be their own unique thing. It's not going to be like here's an imitation of this brand that you know. It would more be like here's this new thing, and then you can find really personalized personalization. Because in one of the videos they had said something that really stood out to me where they said, you know, the top 50 brands in the world determine what 7 billion people are going to be consuming. And so it's built on the profiles of the masses. But now you'll be able to go to personalization at a whole new level. So is that how you think it's going to roll out? People aren't going to look to get their name brand from your machine. They're going to look to get just an amazing thing just for them from your machine and fall in love with that.

(Matt at 00:43:31) Yeah. I think, well, maybe two points there that you're bringing up. I think, listen, at the end of the day, people buy from trusted brands. You and I do. Everyone does. There's no doubt about that. That's tried and tested. I think that's going to be timeless. And so you have to establish some trust. And so for us in our platform, there's some trust that already exists with brands that are out in the world that you and I are drinking right now. So we want to have those as part of our platform. However, those brands are constrained by the physical space that exists in stores now.

(Matt at 00:44:10) Those brands can't, they probably have hundreds of different types of beverages that they could put out there. But if you're in charge of the number one selling beverage brand at one of those big beverage companies, and I come along as your R&D guy and go, listen, this Joel, this test is amazing. You've got to put it on the shelves. You're going to say no way. No way. I've got a couple hundred million dollar business here. I'm not going to pull it off the shelf for this thing that may, I tested in some surveys, and I think it tastes okay. And so that trade-off becomes very hard for you. But we don't have that situation because we're all digital. We have infinite shelf space. We're not restricted. So when we start talking about, I think one of the points you brought up was around, you know, there's like 50 types of beverages that have kind of been made for everybody. That's because they're limited by physical space.

(Matt at 00:45:00) And when you eliminate that physical space and you can introduce hundreds of different beverages, now everybody has the exact version that they like. You and I may both drink coffee, but you may like yours with a little more of ingredient A, and I like mine with a little more ingredient B, but neither of us could really get that because there's just no shelf space. But now both of us can get exactly what we want. So we call that the long tail of beverages. There's lots of room for us to create hundreds and hundreds of different versions of beverages so that everybody can get exactly what they want on the personalization scale. And so that's one aspect of it that I think you brought up there. Then the other aspect of it is brands. There's going to be the ones we know and love. Like I said, there's going to be new and emerging ones, like I was mentioning with some of the interesting partners that we're bringing on, like Simone.

(Matt at 00:46:00) And then there's going to be places where we may create beverages if there's a gap. If some beverage doesn't exist for a certain type of cocktail, let's say, Cana might lean in and build something there. But what's really interesting is, again, that's just going to be a branded beverage to a consumer, to someone drinking it, to me or someone else. It doesn't really matter what the brand is about as long as it tells a compelling story about the beverage. And as long as the beverage tastes good, there's not a lot to make up for there when you're introducing a new brand to someone.

(Matt at 00:46:41) So net new brand, as long as it tastes good, then people are going to, it's going to meet their expectations and they'll probably end up having it again. So it's kind of a couple of different aspects to personalization there. But our theory is the long tail of beverages is the problem that we're solving. And because we have infinite shelf space, that's going to become the thing that really drives people to come back and continue to use Cana over time because you get a lot of the personalized beverages you want.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:08) So cana.com, people can go do their pre-registration. You're looking at maybe twelve months or so, depending on supply chains, they get theirs.

(Matt at 00:47:18) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:18) And is there anything else you want to leave them with?

(Matt at 00:47:22) We are hiring for every type of engineering job that exists. So if anyone out there thinks this is awesome and wants to come and change the world and wants to come to a company that's sustainability first, then check cana.com for lots of our open jobs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:41) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.