Wine Recreation Research Discovery

David Friedberg shares how he discovered the idea for Cana, a device that recreates beverages using chemical compounds.

"I was at dinner with a professor from UC Davis back in late 2019 or 2018. He told me about this research paper published by a scientist in Germany at the Technical University of Munich who runs a flavor science lab. The scientist took a glass of wine and reduced it from 500 compounds down to about 37 or 40 compounds. He gave it to a consumer sensory panel and they couldn't tell the difference between that wine and the original wine. He did it with multiple wines and made declarative statements that we could recreate all beverages with just a few dozen compounds.

I said to the guy at dinner, 'Why don't we just make the Star Trek replicator for beverages? We could just print any beverage if we could get those few dozen compounds to people's homes.'

We had a scientist in residence at TBB, our R&D foundry, and I asked him to read these papers and try to recreate these experiments. We wanted to see if it was feasible to create thousands of beverages using just a few dozen compounds that would make economic sense in a flavor cartridge. After about a year and a half, we convinced ourselves this could work. We ran chemistry and hardware programs, built spreadsheet models, and proved the tech could work. Now after 3 years, we have working prototypes ready for production."