Keurig Kold: a $370 soda machine that took five hours to make one 8-ounce drink

Keurig Kold, the home soda machine Keurig Green Mountain developed with Coca-Cola's backing, launched in October 2015 at $369–$370 and was discontinued nine months later, in June 2016. Each 8-ounce serving cost $0.99 to $1.29 — four-packs of Coca-Cola pods ran $4.99 — and the machine took up to five hours to cool a drink, against the two hours advertised. Keurig cut 108 jobs at the Vermont plant that built it and offered full refunds to Kold owners.

The failure was a product and pricing decision, not bad luck. At $370 against SodaStream's $79 and home-soda costs of $0.08–$0.20 a serving, Kold was the most expensive way to make the least soda. Beverage analyst Howard Telford of Euromonitor called it 'an ambitious experiment that proved to be too expensive without sufficient market demand'. The machine was also bulky, noisy, and made only 8-ounce drinks at a time when per-capita soda consumption in the US was falling, from 52.4 gallons in 2004 to 41.4 gallons in 2015.

The company had bet that the coffee-pod playbook would transfer to soda. Coca-Cola invested more than $1 billion for a 10% stake in Keurig Green Mountain in 2014, a partnership built around developing a Keurig cold-drink system — the platform that became Kold. When the product flopped, the partnership survived: JAB Holding bought Keurig Green Mountain for $13.9 billion in March 2016. But Kold became a textbook case of a machine that made a worse, more expensive version of something people already had in cans.