Coca-Cola, Bluetooth let you make personalized drinks

Zlati Meyer | USA TODAY

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You use your smartphone to do everything from booking concert tickets to hailing a cab. Now you'll be able to use it to fill a cup with Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola is unveiling a new fountain drink machine this weekend that lets you use Bluetooth technology to prepare your drink precisely the way you want it with a few taps on your smartphone.

Like your Diet Coke mixed with Diet Sprite? No problem. Want some vanilla flavor in your Fanta? You got it.

While a Coke dispenser might seem like a strange place to find innovation, it's the kind of move that could give the Atlanta-based soft-drink giant an advantage in the hyper-competitive beverage market. Smartphones make sense for drink ordering, because they will not only allow you to order exact percentages of different mixtures or flavor addition but also remember your preference for next time.

Empowering people to customize their creations — in this case, over ice — helps companies build long-lasting relationships with them, according to consumer behavior experts. That translates into more frequent and larger purchases.

"A greater level of customization really allows companies to connect with consumers, especially when it's what they're looking for and making them feel special," said Charles Lindsey, an associate professor of marketing at the University at Buffalo.

The upgraded machine, called the Freestyle 9100, also has some new, but not yet activated, features Coca-Cola expects to need in the future. With the activation of a microphone, for instance, it could mix drinks from voice commands.

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The new Freestyle, with its 200 mix-and-match beverage choices, will be revealed at the National Restaurant Association’s trade show in Chicago this weekend.

"Consumers want to customize their beverages and are into variety. That’s only growing," said Chris Hellmann, vice president and general manager of Coca-Cola's Freestyle platform .

The previous iteration customized drinks using QR codes, but that required a more cumbersome process on a phone app. More than 50,000 of the machines were installed, many of them at restaurants of major fast-food chains in the U.S. The new machine arrives next year.

Coca-Cola also uses information from the fountain machines to gain insight into what consumers want, Hellmann said. For example, the idea for Sprite Cherry and Sprite Cherry Zero, introduced in packaged form last year, came from that data.

Bottled water has bumped soda to become Americans' favorite drink. In 2016, Americans bought 12.8 billion gallons of H2O versus 12.4 billion gallons of carbonated soft drinks, according to Beverage Marketing, a research and consulting company.

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Follow USA TODAY reporter Zlati Meyer on Twitter: @ZlatiMeyer