In the midst of "Always Coca-Cola" and "Nothing Else is a Pepsi," Salt Lake City's Fountain Fresh Beverages has quietly taken some of the fizz out of a few soft drink markets in Utah.
The locally based firm has 25 in-store, self-service beverage centers throughout Wasatch Front supermarkets that give customers a choice of 40 regular and diet carbonated flavors dispensed in one- and two-liter bottles.The 10-year-old company also sells purified drinking water.
And according to Fountain Fresh president Otto Cutts, after the product is introduced at a given location, as much as half of the store's soft drink market is reaped by Fountain Fresh in the first 60 to 100 days.
"When we first began at the Springville Ream's store, we had 50 percent of the volume. It's been phenomenal," Cutts said. "When we go into a store, we do a very high volume, then settle into about 20 to 30 percent."
The 3-month-old Springville location is the company's first in Utah County, and Cutts said he is planning to put one of the machines in a Macey's Food & Drug store in Provo.
In Salt Lake County, Fresh Fountain's beverage centers can be found throughout area supermarkets, including 10 Ream's Food Stores, three Dan's Foods stores and a few IGA and other independent stores.
"I think it's a good product, a good alternative," said Dave Fischer, manager of the 7000 S. Cottonwood Dan's Foods store. "If you're looking for beverages with lots of different flavors, this is perfect.
"We've had no complaints in the six months they've been here," Fischer added. "I think the key has been their maintenance, their care in keeping it up. The machine has been wonderful, and customers seem to like it; they like the novelty of it."
To utilize the self-service system, customers use sterilized bottles obtained from the center, then push a button for the desired flavor, inserting the bottle into a holder. The bottle is raised to a position where it is pressure-filled in a matter of seconds and then lowered for the customer to take.
Once filled and removed, the customer caps the bottle and takes it to the checkout counter where a bar code label is affixed. It can be refilled as many times as wanted.
Cutts said the ingenuity of Utah inventors and several patents have made the self-service system possible to work free of service problems - challenges usually associated with beverage dispensing.
"We have two significant patents," he said. "The proportioning pumps, invented in Utah, that allows a perfect drink every time. It really is ingenious, dispensing one part syrup, five parts water."
He said the carbonated water goes down the sides of the bottle while the syrup is dispensed down the middle, offering proper proportionality.
"With other beverage companies, 50 percent of the service calls deal with machines that are dispensing product out of proportion," he said. "The other significance is our patented bottle washing system."
Cutts said he was first interested in commercializing the reusable, self-service soft drink idea after doing consulting work in Toronto.
"We were looking for investment projects, and this particular idea came to our attention," he said. "We thought this would generate significant market-share capture."
The company president said now he is set to roll out his product into other regions across the United States and internationally.
"We've spent significantly for research and development, and the sales will follow. We're targeting Phoenix and Oklahoma City and hope to get into Las Vegas."
He added there are three machines in California in Sacramento and Modesto and that one recently opened up in a WalMart Super Center in Moore, Okla.
Cutts said equipment has already been shipped to Russia, Australia and the Philippines, and the company is looking and talking with people in Sweden, Brazil, the Caribbean, South Africa, Italy and the United Kingdom.
"We're also touring India and middle Asia, and hopefully something will come out of that," he added.