In early 2021, as the pandemic entered its second year, I gave my wife a Drinkworks Home Bar for Valentine’s Day. A joint venture of Keurig, Dr. Pepper, and Anheuser-Busch, the jazzy machine combines water, CO2, and pods of drink concentrate to make cocktails, beer, and cider much like a Keurig turns out coffee. Optical codes on the pods tell the machine what temperature to chill the drink and how much carbonation to add.
It is, I admit, superfluous—especially for a former bartender. But if you like variety in your alcoholic beverages and don’t want to keep a lot of beer, liquor, and mixers on-hand, it’s a nice product. And it’s a great party trick.
Sadly, last winter the company announced it was discontinuing the product, and this spring it is stopping selling the pods. Sometime in the coming months, after draining our stockpile of concentrated Manhattans and mimosas, our Drinkworks will become a brick.
It’s a reminder that Schumpeter’s creative destruction not only yields lost employment but abandoned ideas as well. Market success isn’t assured by hard work, clever technology, or novel ideas, but by suppliers and consumers finding mutually satisfactory exchange. As much as I like my Drinkworks, apparently not enough others did to make continuing the venture worthwhile to Keurig and A-B. Those firms are now reallocating their resources to other uses that they expect will satisfy greater consumer demand. Overall, creative destruction is good for humanity, but it does yield many individual disappointments. And it’s OK to be frustrated by that.
Fortunately, the creation keeps going, along with the destruction. Though Drinkworks has given up on the home robot bartender business, others haven’t. A few years ago, Keurig also gave up on another joint venture, the soft-drink-making Keurig Kold, but other home soft drink devices seem to be thriving.
As for my Drinkworks, who knows? Sometimes, abandoned ideas subsequently find market success. Maybe some clever Drinkworks redditers or other innovators will find a way to un-brick my machine.
Thomas A. Firey is a Cato Institute senior fellow and managing editor of Cato’s policy journal Regulation.
READER COMMENTS
Robert Coffey
Apr 30 2022 at 9:07am
https://youtu.be/QyA5vUeOkdA
I think yours is one of the ones reviewed above. If so, I am not surprised it is now a brick.
David
Apr 30 2022 at 6:07pm
I wonder how the Drinkworks product differs from whatever Cana ends up producing (assuming Cana ever releases its product). I’d never heard of Drinkworks before, but at least on the surface it sounds very similar to the Cana concept. Cana has been doing a whole lot of marketing in the past year. Honestly, I am not a huge fan of the concept primarily due to the DRM and vendor lock-in involved, but Keurig have made it work in the coffee niche.
Ken P
May 1 2022 at 1:23am
There’s a new one in the works that uses a first principles approach so that individual chemicals that contribute to taste, mouthfeel, etc are mixed in the ratios for the drink in question. This allows customization and the ability to do difficult drinks like wines. Just in pre-order stage right now. Will be interesting to see if this one hits its mark.
https://www.cana.com/
Henri Hein
May 2 2022 at 6:34pm
One of the many other wonderful things about capitalism is that we get special interest groups/grass-roots/fan-clubs – whatever you want to call a group of customers that are fans of a product and develop their own after-market solutions. With the Keurig coffee machine, there was a customer-driven effort to develop reusable pods. They are now a commercial product as well, but at first it was purely a do-it-yourself initiative. There is a good video on how here: https://youtu.be/uNjDrB1O-eA. I have also seen people use simple foil for the top.
I would not be surprised at all if fans of your DrinksWorks find a way to develop your own pods at home.
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