Cana
Cana built the universe's first molecular beverage printer—to reduce waste while giving customers radically more choice and personalization in their beverage experience.
Hundreds of beverages at the tap of a button feels like the future. It's like something out of Star Trek. At Cana, we aimed to disrupt a beverage industry stuck in the past and responsible for an incredible amount of waste and emissions.
Cana was an early stage startup with $40M in funding. I joined to lead UX Design. We defined problems, identified users, and decided on key features. We worked through branding and identity. We launched a website and produced videos. We taste tested a lot of beverages from the lab. It was fun.
Early on, we determined our key differentiators. We believed them to be variety, personalization, and sustainability. All together, they contribute to a feeling of amazement.
To impress massive variety on our customer, we developed a content strategy to group our many recipes under brands. We worked to bring existing brands, like Hella Cocktail Co., onto our platform. We also partnered with creators, like Emily Sears and Simone Giertz, to make new beverage brands.
Our visual brand strategy not only expressed variety, it enabled more of it. Small changes in recipes could be leveraged to introduce new brands, thus expanding the catalog's breadth even further.
We crafted a familiar interface on the device and mobile app. Priority was comprehension over novelty. We built for families, adding profiles and parental controls. We developed a simple system for beverage customization. We explored gamification to encourage discovery and celebrate sustainability.
Make any beverage your own with customization—a key part of personalization
Get unique content with every pour—adding to a feeling of amazement
Get rewarded when you take advantage of variety
To scale our catalog, we made a tool that would allow anyone to create beverages on the spot (versus bespoke and expensive recipe creation in the lab). The tool was a showpiece, designed for a large touchscreen display. We planned to fold this concept into our consumer app so everyone could play.
Over $30M later and a heroic effort, Cana shut down. Many hurdles remained to bring the product to market, and in 2023's challenging funding environment we were too risky a bet.