How Five Guys Helped Launch Coca-Cola Freestyle Machines

When Five Guys came on the culinary scene, they represented a new kind of burger joint. Like Burger King and McDonald's, burgers and fries are served up fast and cooked to order, but the food is of a higher quality, at a higher price, and with bigger portions, like one would find at a sit-down restaurant, brew pub, or a food truck. So it's no coincidence that Five Guys has proven to be a hit with foodies and critics, voted the Burger Brand of the Year two years running by Harris Poll (via Business Insider).

One of the things that sets Five Guys apart and above the competition is its straightforward menu. Their standard fare consists of burgers with or without cheese or with or without bacon, and with one patty or two, plus fries and shakes. Everything is customizable with condiments and add-ons, but the most varied and expansive part of the Five Guys menu is the soft drinks. Most outlets are equipped with a Coca-Cola Freestyle kiosk, a cutting-edge vending machine that can sell literally hundreds of different beverages. Five Guys got dibs on the novel technology because it helped develop the Freestyle. Here's the inside story.

In 2004, per Wired, Coca-Cola was approaching its 125th anniversary and reflecting on how far it had come, from dispensing a single beverage at soda fountains into a global conglomerate producing more than 100 drinks. Nilang Patel, head of Coca-Cola's research department in Atlanta at the time, wanted to create a high-tech soda or vending machine, like the ones found in fast food restaurants and convenience stores, one that could dispense most if not all of its 100-plus beverages.

Patel outsourced the job to Dean Kamen, one of the most prominent American inventors in the early 2000s. According to the Stevens Institute of Technology, Kamen invented the Segway scooter, a portable dialysis machine for home use, and the insulin pump. The latter two devices involve extremely well calibrated and slowly pumped delivery of medicine in concentrated liquid form — meaning Patel knew Kamen would have some idea of how to make a machine that could hold numerous kinds of soda syrup for mixing with water and other ingredients. Kamen signed up for the project because developing the soda machine would help him develop similar technology that could be used to make compact, low-cost water purification machines he could distribute to the developing world, Probiotic Solutions reports.

With the assistance of Dean Kamen, the six-person engineering team at Coca-Cola, according to the company website, figured out that they could break down most soft drinks into its basic components, concentrate them by taking out water and sweetener, they'd be left with tiny packets of ingredients that could then be reassembled at the push of a touch-screen button by a consumer. Called "PurePour" technology, per Fast Company, the machine uses precise computerized measurement to create the perfect serving of a soft drink along with RFID scanners to make sure everything comes out correctly, based around a 46-ounce cartridge of concentrated beverage fluid held deep in the machine.

That made it possible for a Freestyle, as it could eventually be named, to offer customizable sodas numbering more than 100 choices, including flagship varieties like Coca-Cola and Sprite, diet, caffeine-free, and flavored versions of popular brands, Coke-owned subsidiaries' beverages, hard to find choices and drinks sold overseas, and temporary and limited-time offerings.

In the summer of 2009, Coca-Cola began test-marketing its Freestyle machines in 60 locations in Georgia, California, and Utah, per Fast Company. Just two years later, the cutting edge drink dispensing technology received a major vote of confidence and some instantaneous blanket visibility when Five Guys became the biggest food service partner to that date to install Coca-Cola Freestyle kiosks in its stores. BusinessWire reports that the high-end fast food burger chain and its soft drink supplier had already enjoyed a lengthy working relationship — Coca-Cola had been Five Guys' one and only soft drink provider since it opened its first restaurants in the mid-1980s. When Coca-Cola unveiled its next-generation, envelope-pushing self-serve soda dispensers in the 2010s, Five Guys was right there with them, agreeing to give the Freestyle machines a try as part of a lucrative contract extension.

Five Guys committed to bringing in two Freestyle machines to all of its company-owned stores, a sizable portion of the 1,000-plus locations open at the time of the 2011 rollout (via Forbes). As of 2022, according to ScrapeHero, there are more than 1,400 Five Guys outlets in the U.S., and most of them prominently display a duo of Freestyle machines.