The unique joys of startup culture in a large enterprise: the story of Coca-Cola Freestyle

Source: Coca-Cola website. Banner introducing the Coca-Cola Freestyle concept.

Gregg Carpenter, Global Director of Engineering, The Coca-Cola Company, is part of the team which brought the Coca-Cola Freestyle to the world. The Freestyle concept allows consumers to combine different iconic flavours to create unique beverages for themselves.

In his keynote at the opening of TechInnovation 2016, titled Coke's Formula for Developing and Integrating Disruptive Technologies. Carpenter shared that the Coca-Cola Company had given the Freestyle team free rein to develop the concept, in effect allowing them to run a startup environment within a large corporation.

"If we offered (consumers) variety and if we offered them choice they would buy more. This became our guiding light: a proposition around choice, around variety," he said.

There was a lot of pressure to commercialise the concept, and the team had to develop a lot of equipment and systems in-house, drawing on partners to provide the expertise that it did not have, Carpenter recalled, calling the situation "a house of cards where one change can change everything".

A Coca-Cola Freestyle machine at Vivocity, Singapore.

The situation was extremely fluid, Carpenter explained. "It is not a straight line.. things change all the time, it's the art of compromise," he said. "(There was) never complete information but we made decisions and moved forward, the team made it happen, to coordinate and do business that way. We had to build the plane and fly it at the same time, we had to create it all from scratch."

Carpenter also shared that the Freestyle machine was built to be connected at a time when only bank ATMs were connected, even though it was expensive to do so in 2006, when mobile broadband was not yet available. "We wanted our equipment to be an evolving platform – with a connected machine, with software, the design doesn't stop once it leaves the factory," he explained, pointing out that software updates via a network connection were much cheaper than sending a service technician to make an update.

Technology also helped to make the Freestyle front-end easy to use.  "We wanted it to be intuitive, we wanted it to be easy. If you have to read a manual you've failed," he said. 

Near field communication was not available at the time so Carpenter's team took RFID technology and redesigned it to meet their needs. "The reality for us has been that technology hasn't been designed for Coca-Cola. So we take technology and shape it for our needs," he said.

Carpenter is now a big data analytics and Internet of Things veteran. "Machines (in the field) knew better what was going on than the engineers in the room. We had debug code in the machine send back reams of data that would tell us all kinds of things that would tell us about the internal operations of the machine. The IT guys hated it – it clogged up the network and filled up all the servers. It's like gold. We got into predictive analytics. We weren't doing it because it was an opportunity for us. We did it because we needed to do it," he said.

"We would see a machine in the field and something would break, and we would look at the data and ask if there was any indication, before it failed, that something would happen. And we could see days and weeks in advance that something was going wrong. So we got this fingerprint and were able to search the thousands of machines out there that had this precursor, that a problem was imminent, and in many cases we found it, and were able to send technicians out with an idea of what to solve, fixing it right the first time, with the right parts. The right kind of data, the right sort of sensors – it is a tremendous capability for the fleet."

Today, Coca-Cola Freestyle is expanding globally. Consumers can download an app to communicate with the machine. "It started out as a startup in a big company trying to do something different," concluded Carpenter. "The important thing is the journey behind the equipment, this is what connects us (the audience) as a community. This is what it takes to bring an idea to life. It is quite difficult,  but it is possible." 

Source: Coca-Cola Freestyle locator page. There is a Coca-Cola Freestyle machine at the 7-Eleven at Cineleisure, along Orchard Road.

Carpenter speaks at the Techinnovation keynote. 

Interested?

Find out if there are Coca-Cola Freestyle machines in your city

Watch a video showing how to mix drinks at a Coca-Cola Freestyle machine

Hashtags: #cocacola_freestyle, #Techinnovation2016