Designers: Coca-Cola Design, The Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Manufacturer: The Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Joining the next-generation Freestyle family in 2021, the Coca-Cola Freestyle 8100 is for crew-serve and drive-through service at restaurants across the US.
The Freestyle system uses highly concentrated micro-dosed ingredient cartridges to deliver 200+ drink choices in a self-contained compact form factor.
The system has intelligence to inform crew on upcoming refill needs on the UI or through the Crew App, and provides customers with consumption data, trends and other business metrics.
Freestyle dispensers are built with close attention to sustainability – the cartridges are produced in a LEED Gold facility.
The highly concentrated cartridges reduce the logistics of shipping volumes of liquid, and the dispensers that have an 8+ year lifespan are designed for easy disassembly and material recovery as well as remanufacturing of end-of-life units for new accounts and replacements.
The existing crew-serve experience, designed in 2006 was becoming outdated. As crew-serve had grown to 40% of the multi-billion revenue Freestyle business, the team initiated an end-to-end experience program for 8100.
They set up the project based on a classic ‘Design Thinking’ approach, starting with the customer, user and end-consumer. The project took an ethnographic approach to understand the workflow in drive-through.
In addition to owner-operator interviews, the team observed crew workflows and documented the end-consumer experience with scripted interactions. The observations were analyzed in creative sessions across Coke teams including marketing, engineering, product managers and design to identify opportunity areas.
The project delivered a cleaner, contemporary and smarter solution that costs less than its predecessor.
The UI has options to integrate multiple ‘point-of-sale’ entries and speeds up direct-selection by simple layout and animation tools. The simplified, rounded ID promotes easy operation and cleaning while integrating into the company brand guidelines & standards.
By using common materials and processes to align with the rest of the Freestyle platforms, 8100 delivers low production, service and remanufacturing costs while capturing the ‘contemporary nostalgia’ feel of the rest of the fleet.
UI development was based on observations, cross-functional ‘design thinking’ sessions, qual and quant testing, and eventual prototyping for evaluation with service crew.
The Coca-Cola Freestyle 8100 optimizes overall service experience in speed of service, accuracy of orders, efficiency, easier maintenance, and increased job satisfaction.
The final design solution incorporates the learnings from research, ideation and testing into a combination of hardware and software that is now being tested in select customer installations.
The UI has options to integrate multiple ‘point-of-sale’ entries and speeds up direct selection by simple layout and animation tools. The system has integrated sensors to make operation faster and more intuitive – testing has shown a 20% efficiency gain.
