Next-gen water cooler

One of every six water bottles used in the U.S. is recycled, and the rest are sent to landfills or end up littered on land and in rivers, lakes, and the ocean, where they can take hundreds of years to disintegrate. Delivering bottled beverages in trucks also produces a lot of carbon emissions.

Dubbed by some media as an “ecofriendly water cooler,” Bevi is a smart beverage-dispensing machine — made with high-quality components inspired by medical devices — that filters and adds carbonation and customisable flavours to tap water in offices, gyms, and hotels.

According to the startup, Bevi machines located nationwide have saved more than 4 million plastic bottles from ending up in landfills, and each machine can potentially eliminate the use of 35,000 plastic bottles per year. The company is also shipping machines to Hong Kong and Singapore for pilot testing in the coming months.

As each Bevi machine is Internet-connected, the startup can leverage real-time data to provide proactive services and maintenance and gather insightful — and sometimes unexpected — data on beverage choice among demographic groups and across regions to refine its product.

Already in 600 locations in Boston, New York, and San Francisco, the Bevi machines are starting to see rapid adoption across all major U.S. cities thanks to a deal with major vending company Canteen signed in December.

“It seems like every week now we’re in a new state,” says MIT Sloan School of Management alumnus Sean Grundy MBA ’13, who co-founded the startup and co-developed the machines with classmate Frank Lee MBA ’13 and Rhode Island School of Design graduate Eliza Becton.

Standing a slim five feet tall, the Bevi machines are hooked up to a tap water source. Water runs through the machine’s custom filtration system. Consumers can select from flavours of still and sparkling water, such as unsweetened raspberry or lime, pomegranate, and kiwi-strawberry. A sliding scale on the touchscreen adjusts sweetness.

Bevi contains components of a traditional soda fountain. But in order to keep the beverage quality high to compete with the bottled-drink industry, Grundy says, the startup took inspiration from a surprising source — medical devices.

In early market research, the Bevi co-founders heard two major complaints about traditional soda fountain flavours. One, drinks from soda fountains often taste very different with each pour, due to different levels of carbonation, flavour dilution, and other aspects. Also, multiple drinks share the same nozzle, so the flavours will often blend.

A reason for these quality issues is that typical soda fountains use analog pumps that are manually adjusted to push concentrate into a stream of water with no real consistency. Over time, the pumps also shift in place and the quality of drinks changes.

The team decided, instead, to custom-make a beverage-mixing system using traditional components and peristaltic pumps typically used in medical devices such as dialysis machines, to digitally control doses.

“When you’re dispensing life-saving medications into a blood stream, you can’t one day dispense a little too much, and another day too little. Standards are much higher,” Grundy says.

By using Bevi’s touchscreen sliding scale, consumers adjust the speed at which the peristaltic pumps dispense concentrate into the water, delivering an exact concentration of flavour.

A secondary benefit of using digital pumps, Grundy adds, is they allow the startup to remotely monitor concentration levels. When quantities are low, an alert is sent to the operations team via software in the Bevi offices in Boston and San Francisco.

“From a service standpoint, we can then optimise our route before we hit the road,” Lee says. “That actually helps up to optimise costs in terms of service and delivery routes.”

This remote monitoring also drastically limits physical visits to the machines, which reduces operation costs. “That lets us be profitable in a whole host of locations that traditional beverage machines would have a hard time operating in,” Lee says. Those include midsized venues without much foot traffic, such as offices, gyms, and hotels.

Initially, Bevi used the data to monitor the machines for functionality and service updates. “But that’s evolved in a big way, where we use this technology to make business decisions,” Grundy says.

Data, for instance, reveal how flavours fare across locations. If a client orders a certain flavour because it sounds good, but it’s not performing well, the startup may discontinue the flavour or tweak its formula.

This flavour data has led to some surprising insights into beverage choice in regions and among demographics. A couple years ago, for instance, Bevi received some distribution advice from the vending industry. The suggestion was to ship sweeter flavours to a startup with young workers and to ship more zero-calorie, unsweetened options to an insurance company with older employees.

“We found the flavour choice was exactly the reverse,” Grundy says. “In the young company, the healthy, zero-calorie options did really well, and people weren’t touching the sweet drinks. In the older demographic, everyone was shying away from the unsweetened drinks and wanted things more reminiscent of traditional soft drinks. That was one interesting example where the data proved the status-quo opinion to be wrong.”