The Coca-Cola Freestyle machine at your movie theater has been secretly deciding what hits store shelves for 17 years

The hallowed Coca-Cola Freestyle machine at your movie theater has been secretly deciding what hits store shelves for 17 years.

That touchscreen soda fountain you use to mix wild drink combos is doing a lot more than serving fizzy fun.

Behind the scenes, Coca-Cola has been turning every pour into a stream of data that helps it figure out what people actually want to drink.

And some of those movie-theater flavor experiments have gone on to become real products you can get in real bottles and cans.

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How the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine decides what hits store shelves

Most people see the Freestyle machine as a fun novelty.

You tap a screen, add a cherry shot here, a vanilla twist there, and head back to your seat feeling like a king with a combination of sodas that no one must have ever thought of before.

But instead of a fun pick n mix style machine, the beverage company itself sees something much bigger.

The company has used its Freestyle machines, first introduced in 2009, to track what drinks people choose, when they choose them, and which flavor combos keep showing up again and again.

That gives Coca-Cola a direct look at what customers are actually pouring for themselves instead of what they say they might buy in a survey.

And that is where things get seriously clever.

According to Forbes, Coca-Cola said the launch of Cherry Sprite was influenced by data gathered from these self-service fountains.

In other words, customers were effectively helping build the next store-bought flavor one movie theater drink at a time.

What drinks were created thanks to the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine

Coca-Cola didn’t stop at one success story either.

Later reporting showed the company had brought several Freestyle-inspired drinks to stores, including Sprite Cherry, Coke Cherry Vanilla, Coke Orange Vanilla, and Sprite Strawberry with Lymonade.

Executives said the machine’s data helps guide innovation on the bottled and canned side of the business because it reveals the flavors people genuinely come back for.

So the next time you stand in front of that glowing Freestyle screen trying to decide between raspberry Sprite and orange Coke, just know this: your drink choice might be doing more than quenching your thirst, it might be auditioning for a place on the shelf at your local store.

So, we have to thank the cinemagoers of America for the existence of Cherry Sprite.