Matt Mahar, CEO of Cana, joins Cheddar Innovates to discuss how the world's first molecular beverage printer can eliminate waste from the beverage industry.

Cheddar Innovates

This Beverage Printer is Fighting Waste and Fueling Sustainability

cutting back on plastic usage is something we can all do to help the state of our environment and one industry in particular is a huge contributor to this problem, The beverage industry, that's why our next guest has created the world's first molecular beverage printer called Canna one. So you can print thousands of beverages from the comfort of your home without the plastic, aluminum or even glass ways joining us. Now is matt Mahar Ceo of Canna. Thanks for being here, can you walk us through how can A one works? And also this experience? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Um so Cano won. The way Canon One works is we provide people with any beverage they want anytime they want with zero waste. And what we've unlocked is we've unlocked the world of beverages for people by creating a universal set of beverage ingredients and those ingredients go inside of our molecular beverage printer which we call the Cheonghawon and those ingredients are mixed with the water that's already in your home to give people essentially the beverage aisle on their countertop so they can create any beverage anytime. That's incredible. Can you tell us more about your mission to eliminate waste from the beverage industry and really put into perspective how big of a contributor this industry has been, especially as people are trying to live more sustainable lives. I know personally this has been a huge issue and trying to pivot from a lot of the plastic usage, the aluminum usage and even the glass waste that we see. Yeah it's it's the beverage industry is kind of a silent contributor. Um and we're showing them a microscope on that and so you know, you look at the centralized way we create beverages now and those beverage, the way we do it now is we we ship essentially bottles of water from point a to point b. And that's because what's in those containers that you and I are drinking is 90% water. Right? Only about 10% of those ingredients that are in that that bottle or can are the really important ingredients that give any beverage its flavor, its aroma and its mouth feel. And so every year when we're distributing and we're manufacturing and we're creating and we're growing all of the ingredients that we need to make our beverages. You know, we're creating about a trillion bottles and cans every single year that just go into landfills or into oceans and lakes and streams were emitting half a gigatons of co two every single year. Um and we're using over 400 trillion liters of water every single year to create these beverages when it's all of that is completely unnecessary because we already have the water that we need that's in our home, which is the main ingredient in creating our drinks. So interesting. And this took about three years to come about for you to create. Can you tell us more about the research and the engineering that went into Canada one. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we've been at it for about four years and what we've been able to figure out through those four years through a lot of, you know, deep tech and analysis using kind of modern instrumentation, which we call El CMS and GCms or liquid chromatography, mass Spectrometry in gas chromatography, mass spectrometry is that When you look at the molecules and the ingredients that are in a beverage, there's essential beverages, essential ingredients in each beverage and you and I were not super complex. We can only detect maybe 30 or 40 ingredients every time we drink something and you have complex beverages like a wine. That's a have 400 ingredients. And what we've figured out is What are the essential 40 ingredients that you need to create a wine? And at the same time over those three years, what we realized was that those ingredients that are in a wine, those are the exact same ingredients that are in a tea or a coffee or a beer or a soda or or a juice. And so we've created a universal set of ingredients. There's about 150 of them. Right. And we know exactly what amount to measure those in and exactly how to dispense those so that we can create thousands of different beverages from people. Yeah, just about 30 seconds left with you. But what kind of potential does this technology hold and how else do you think it can be applied outside of beverages. Yeah. You know that five or 10 years we'll be doing food for sure. There's no doubt in my mind that our technology is essentially three D. Printing beverages now will be three D. Printing food. Not only that I think any, our goal is to decentralize the manufacturing of household consumables, so soaps, detergents, anything like that, obviously a different device, but um, we think that we can, you know, create anything instantly for people in their home that they would consume. So cool. Seriously, the sky is the limit here. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing that. That's matt Mahara Ceo of Kanna.