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See also: Beverage ChatGPT Plugins
Artificial intelligence in the beverage industry covers the use of machine learning, generative AI, computer vision, and robotics in the development, production, marketing, distribution, and serving of drinks. The category spans soft drinks, spirits, wine, beer, coffee, tea, and bottled water. By 2024 most of the world's largest beverage companies, including The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Diageo, Pernod Ricard, and Starbucks, had publicly announced AI projects covering at least one of the following: flavor design, recipe generation, advertising creative, demand forecasting, route-to-market optimization, robotic dispensing, and consumer personalization.
The most visible work to date has been generative work in marketing and product branding. Coca-Cola's 2023 "Create Real Magic" platform, built with OpenAI and Bain & Company on top of GPT-4 and DALL-E, let consumers generate Coca-Cola-themed artwork, while the Y3000 Zero Sugar flavor released later that year was marketed as the first Coca-Cola variant "co-created with AI." Sweden's Mackmyra Distillery, with Microsoft and Helsinki agency Fourkind, released what it called the first AI-generated whisky recipe, "Intelligence," in 2019. Other applications, particularly demand forecasting at AB InBev and dynamic personalization at Starbucks through the Deep Brew program, run continuously inside operations and rarely make headlines.
The beverage industry sells fast-moving consumer goods at extreme volume. Coca-Cola alone reported more than 2.2 billion servings of its products sold daily as of 2023. Small efficiency gains in forecasting, route planning, line scheduling, or recipe iteration translate into large dollar effects, which is why most AI investment in the sector is concentrated in operations rather than R&D. At the same time, beverage marketing is dominated by a small number of global brands with very large creative budgets, so generative tools have been adopted aggressively for advertising and packaging visuals.
AI use in beverages can be grouped into several broad areas:
| Area | Typical use | Example companies |
|---|---|---|
| Product and flavor development | Suggesting new flavor profiles, recipes, ingredient combinations | Coca-Cola Y3000, Mackmyra "Intelligence" |
| Marketing and creative | Image generation, ad concepts, packaging, consumer co-creation | Coca-Cola "Create Real Magic," Heinz "AI Ketchup," Coca-Cola "Masterpiece" |
| Mixology and serving | Robotic bartenders, voice-activated dispensers | Cecilia.ai, Makr Shakr |
| Wine and spirits intelligence | Sensory prediction, retail assortment, aging optimization | Tastry, Pernod Ricard Matrix |
| Coffee | Personalization, molecular replicas, robotic baristas | Starbucks Deep Brew, Atomo, Cafe X |
| Supply chain | Demand forecasting, route-to-market, distributor pricing | AB InBev BEES, Coca-Cola bottlers |
The beverage sector is also an early adopter of AI in retail trade systems, since beverage distribution in many markets relies on a fragmented network of small retailers (the so-called traditional trade), which is data-rich and pricing-sensitive.
Flavor development is one of the few R&D tasks in food and drink that maps neatly onto generative models. A flavor brief is a structured prompt (target audience, occasion, sensory notes), and a recipe is a structured output (a list of ingredients and ratios). Both sides translate cleanly into vectors that a model can learn from, and the relevant training data, decades of internal recipes and tasting panels, is owned by a small number of companies.
Swedish craft distillery Mackmyra announced in September 2019 that it had released the first whisky recipe generated by AI. The project paired Mackmyra's master blender Angela D'Orazio with Microsoft and Finnish consultancy Fourkind. The team trained a model on Mackmyra's existing recipes, sales data, and customer preferences, then asked it to generate new candidate recipes. The model proposed roughly 70 million combinations of cask types, barley malts, and distillates. D'Orazio selected one and the distillery bottled it as "Mackmyra Intelligence," priced at around 60 euros per bottle.
Mackmyra and Microsoft positioned the human master blender as the final arbiter; the model surfaced candidates that fell within the distillery's house style, but did not replace the blender's palate. Coverage by the BBC, Forbes, and CNN treated it as a novelty, though the underlying setup (a recommender system over a structured recipe space) is technically straightforward.
On 12 September 2023 Coca-Cola launched Y3000 Zero Sugar, a limited-edition flavor marketed as co-created with artificial intelligence. The drink was sold in the United States, Canada, China, and several European and Latin American markets, and its packaging and futuristic branding were also generated with AI tools. The company said the flavor was developed by analyzing how fans imagined the year 3000 would taste, then using AI to combine those expectations with Coca-Cola's flavor heritage.
Reviewers were mixed on the taste, with several outlets including The Verge, Today, and Insider describing it as a generically fruity Coke variant rather than something genuinely novel. The most common criticism, picked up across food and tech press, was that Coca-Cola never specified what role AI actually played in formulating the recipe. The marketing language was vague enough that several industry analysts described Y3000 as an AI-themed product rather than an AI-formulated one. Coca-Cola has not published technical details on the modeling work behind Y3000.
The Y3000 launch was paired with a generative experience inside the Coca-Cola Creations Hub website, where consumers could use AI to generate "future" themed images on their phone by scanning the can.
Other recipe-side experiments have remained at the press release or pilot stage. McCormick, primarily a spice and seasonings company, has used IBM machine learning since 2019 for flavor pairings, and several of its outputs apply to beverage seasonings. PepsiCo has discussed using AI for snack and drink flavor screening but has not released a flavored beverage publicly branded as AI-developed.
Large consumer beverage brands have used generative AI more aggressively in advertising than almost any other industry, and Coca-Cola in particular has anchored several flagship campaigns on the technology.
On 21 March 2023 Coca-Cola, OpenAI, and Bain & Company launched "Create Real Magic," a platform that gave consumers access to GPT-4 and DALL-E to generate Coca-Cola-branded artwork. Users could combine elements from Coca-Cola's brand archive, including the Spencerian script logo, the Coke contour bottle, and the dynamic ribbon, with their own prompts. A panel of judges selected winning entries, and roughly thirty artists were flown to Coca-Cola's Atlanta headquarters for a follow-up workshop. The campaign was Coca-Cola's first major external use of OpenAI's tools and was the result of an enterprise partnership announced earlier the same year.
Launched alongside "Create Real Magic" in March 2023, the "Masterpiece" film by Blitzworks and OpenX showed a Coke bottle passing through a series of famous artworks, including Vincent van Gogh's self-portrait, Andy Warhol's pop art, Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Hokusai's The Great Wave. The ad was a hybrid production that mixed live action, CGI, and generative AI for some transitions and texture work. Coca-Cola positioned it as a demonstration of "AI plus craft," with the model used as a tool inside a traditional VFX pipeline rather than as the primary generator.
While Heinz is technically a condiment rather than a beverage maker, the campaign is regularly cited as a reference point for beverage CPG marketing. In 2022, Kraft Heinz and agency Rethink Toronto fed DALL-E 2 prompts like "ketchup," "ketchup in space," and "ketchup, Renaissance" and found that the model's outputs consistently produced Heinz-shaped bottles. Heinz turned the result into a global print and video campaign on the theme that "even AI knows that ketchup is Heinz." The campaign won a Cannes Lions in 2023 and is one of the most-cited early case studies of brand identity reinforced by generative AI.
In November 2024 Coca-Cola released a Christmas ad that was a near-shot-for-shot generative remake of its 1995 "Holidays Are Coming" Christmas truck advertisement. The new version was produced by three studios (Secret Level, Silverside AI, and Wild Card) and made heavy use of text-to-video generative models. The ad drew sharp criticism from animators, the visual effects community, and several creative directors who described the result as flat, uncanny, and disrespectful of the human craft behind the original. Critics on social media singled out warped logos on the trucks and animal characters whose anatomy shifted between frames.
Coca-Cola's global vice president of generative AI defended the work as an experiment and emphasized that the company would continue to use AI in its creative pipeline. Coverage in The Wall Street Journal, Variety, Fast Company, and The Guardian framed the controversy as a test case for how the public reacts to commercial AI-generated film. Sales data for the campaign has not been published.
Automated drink dispensing predates AI, but several companies launched in the late 2010s and early 2020s have positioned themselves explicitly as AI bartenders.
| Product | Founded / launched | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Makr Shakr | 2013 (Italy) | Articulated robotic arms developed with MIT; deployed on Royal Caribbean's Quantum of the Seas, Anthem of the Seas, Harmony of the Seas, and Symphony of the Seas as the Bionic Bar. Mixes cocktails from a menu chosen on a tablet. |
| Cecilia.ai | 2021 (Israel) | Standing kiosk shaped like a human bartender, with voice-activated conversation powered by language models and a built-in dispenser. Used at hotels, casinos, and trade shows. |
| Bartesian | 2015 (Canada) | Pod-based home cocktail machine. Less AI than capsule-based dispensing; recipes are pre-programmed. |
| Somabar | 2015 (United States) | Counter-top automated cocktail maker; uses an app for recipe selection. |
| Toni | 2022 (Italy) | Robotic bartender by Makr Shakr offshoot for shopping malls and arenas. |
The Bionic Bar from Makr Shakr, which uses two ABB industrial robotic arms, has been the most visible public deployment. The Royal Caribbean installations have been in service since 2014 and are still the best-known examples of robotic mixology at scale. The arms are tied to a recommendation system that suggests drinks based on time of day, prior orders, and customer preferences.
Cecilia.ai, launched in 2021 by Elad and Bar Kobi, is more explicitly an AI product. The unit pairs a touchscreen avatar with a speech recognition layer and uses generative dialogue to suggest cocktails. The company has compared the experience to Apple's Siri rather than to a vending machine.
Wine and spirits companies have used AI more for the back office than for the bottle. Sensory prediction, retail planning, and aging are the three most common application areas.
Founded in San Luis Obispo, California in 2017 by chemist Katerina Axelsson, Tastry runs a chemistry-plus-machine-learning platform that maps a wine's chemical signature to predicted consumer preferences. The company licenses the system to retailers including Albertsons and to wineries that want to match new releases to demographic segments. Tastry markets its system as B2B infrastructure rather than as a consumer product, and has used the same approach for beer and coffee in pilot deployments.
Pernod Ricard, the second-largest spirits company in the world by sales, announced its Matrix platform in 2020. Matrix collects field, retail, and marketing data into a unified internal tool used by Pernod's brand managers and sales representatives in markets including India, China, Spain, and the United States. The system supports recommendation logic for which products to push to which outlets and how to allocate trade marketing spend. Pernod has described Matrix as the central plank of its data and AI strategy and has expanded the platform with generative AI assistants since 2023.
Diageo, owner of Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, Guinness, and other brands, has spoken publicly about AI in several contexts but has not committed to a single flagship product. The company has worked with Microsoft on cloud and data integration since 2018 and has used machine learning for whisky maturation modeling, which forecasts when a cask of Scotch will reach the desired flavor profile, allowing inventory to be planned with greater accuracy. Diageo has also used computer vision in bottling lines for quality control. Most public references appear in investor presentations and Microsoft case studies rather than consumer-facing marketing.
Several consumer wine subscription services use recommendation models tied to taste questionnaires. Bright Cellars, Winc (which entered bankruptcy in 2022), and Vinebox each used variations of a collaborative-filtering or matrix-factorization model to match customers with monthly bottles. Naked Wines uses AI to predict customer churn and lifetime value. Cuvee Wine Catalyst and other smaller startups have offered AI-curated bottles to wineries directly.
In January 2020, then-CEO Kevin Johnson announced Deep Brew, an internal program inside Starbucks for applying machine learning across the business. Deep Brew is not a single product but a portfolio. Its components include the personalization engine inside the Starbucks app, which suggests menu items to each customer based on prior orders, weather, store location, time of day, and inventory; reinforcement learning models that power the next-order recommendations sent through email and push notifications; staffing and inventory forecasting at the store level; and predictive maintenance for espresso machines and other equipment.
Starbucks has credited Deep Brew with double-digit percentage lifts in incremental revenue from mobile order recommendations and has said the program runs continuously in the background of every transaction in the app. By 2023, Starbucks Rewards had more than 30 million active members in the United States, providing a large pool of training data for the personalization stack.
Atomo is a Seattle startup founded in 2019 by Andy Kleitsch and Jarret Stopforth that produces molecular coffee. The company analyzes the chemical compounds in roasted coffee and reconstructs the flavor and caffeine profile from non-coffee plant ingredients, such as date pits and sunflower seed husks. Atomo has used machine learning to screen ingredient combinations and to predict which substitutions will yield the closest sensory match. The company raised a Series A in 2022 led by S2G Ventures and AgFunder, and shipped ready-to-drink cold brew in 2023.
Several companies have built robotic coffee shops, with cafe-grade espresso machines tied to robotic arms or custom dispensers.
| Company | Founded | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Cafe X | 2015 (San Francisco) | Closed San Francisco stores in 2020; pivoted to airport kiosks. |
| Briggo (later Costa Coffee BaristaBot) | 2009 (Austin, Texas) | Acquired by Coca-Cola through Costa Coffee in 2020. |
| Crown Coffee | 2017 (Singapore) | Robotic kiosk used in trade shows and offices. |
| Botrista | 2017 (United States) | Drink dispenser used by chains for cold drinks, not just coffee. |
These machines combine off-the-shelf espresso hardware with light vision and motion control. Most do not use deep learning during dispensing, though Cafe X has used vision for quality detection on poured drinks.
Driftaway Coffee, a Brooklyn-based subscription roaster, uses a recommendation system to map customer ratings to flavor profiles and to push new origins that fit each customer's palate. The system is closer to a Spotify-style collaborative filter than to deep learning, but it is one of the longest-running consumer-facing personalization stacks in coffee.
Distribution is the dominant cost line in most beverage companies, and AI for forecasting and routing is now common across the largest manufacturers.
AB InBev, the largest brewer in the world, runs a digital B2B platform called BEES that connects the company directly to small retailers. By 2023 BEES was active in more than twenty markets and handled over 60% of AB InBev's revenue, according to the company's investor disclosures. BEES uses recommendation models to suggest which products small retailers should order next, when to reorder, and which promotions to surface. AB InBev has discussed BEES extensively on quarterly earnings calls and has positioned it as a structural change in how the company sells beer.
AB InBev introduced BEES AI, a generative assistant inside BEES, in 2023. The assistant can answer retailer questions about products, suggest assortments, and handle simple service queries.
Coca-Cola's bottling network, which is operated by independent partners such as Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, Coca-Cola FEMSA, and Arca Continental, has used machine learning for demand forecasting since the mid-2010s. The use cases include short-horizon forecasts for distribution centers, vending machine restocking, and dynamic pricing experiments in selected markets. Coca-Cola Europacific Partners has published case studies on Google Cloud's BigQuery and Vertex AI for forecasting and recommendation models. The Coca-Cola Company itself signed a wider partnership with Microsoft Azure in April 2024 covering generative AI for marketing, supply chain, and Salesforce-based customer service.
Most of the large beverage companies, including Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Keurig Dr Pepper, and Heineken, run forecasting and route optimization workloads on either Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or AWS, and have published case studies of varying depth with their cloud vendors. The most consistent message across these case studies is that demand variance, particularly during heatwaves, sports events, and holiday weeks, is the main forecasting target.
The most discussed concern about generative AI in beverages is also the simplest: companies advertise AI as a co-creator of products without disclosing what the model actually did. Y3000 became the standard example. Multiple food and beverage reporters, including writers at The Verge and Food Dive, pointed out that Coca-Cola never specified whether the model proposed flavor compounds, generated marketing concepts, or only assisted with packaging visuals. Without disclosure, AI co-creation reads as a marketing label rather than a verifiable claim. The Mackmyra "Intelligence" launch faced milder versions of the same critique in 2019, with several whisky writers arguing that the master blender's role was understated.
The November 2024 Coca-Cola Christmas ad triggered the largest public backlash to date against a beverage company's use of generative AI. Animator Alex Hirsch posted on X that the ad represented "soulless garbage," a comment that was shared widely. Coverage in The Guardian focused on the loss of work for traditional VFX artists, while The Wall Street Journal framed it as a marketing risk for legacy brands. The visual artifacts in the ad, including warped truck logos and inconsistent animal anatomy, became reference points in subsequent industry conversations about whether AI is yet capable of meeting the standards expected from major brand advertising.
In craft segments, particularly whisky, gin, and natural wine, AI-developed products run into a marketing wall. The premium pricing of craft drinks depends on the perception of human authorship, and AI co-creation undercuts that narrative. Mackmyra's experience suggests the workaround is to position AI as a tool for the human blender rather than as the author, but craft consumers are price-sensitive and skeptical of mass-market positioning.
Generative models in beverage advertising raise the same labor questions as in entertainment. The Coca-Cola Christmas ad controversy made visible the displacement of animators and VFX artists in commercial production. Industry trade press has tracked layoffs at several agencies that historically built out beverage campaigns. As of 2025 there is no industry-wide labor agreement covering AI use in commercial production in the way the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA agreements cover film and television in the United States.