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Fountain Drinks


spdydre

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Does anyone in here have experience with dealing with fountain drinks at a location? One of my locations wants fountain drinks added and I don't have a clue where to start. I think I can get equipment set up from coke and product but what would you charge the location? By product and percentage of sales? Should I even venture off into this route? Any input would be helpful

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Does anyone in here have experience with dealing with fountain drinks at a location? One of my locations wants fountain drinks added and I don't have a clue where to start. I think I can get equipment set up from coke and product but what would you charge the location? By product and percentage of sales? Should I even venture off into this route? Any input would be helpful

I don't personally have these, but I dealt with them when I was in the food service industry in my late teens through early 20's. I see them on Craigslist for sale all the time locally. Usually the whole setup is available, but you will need CO2 tanks to operate, spares to leave the customer between visits, and tanks to swap out when you arrive to service. Bag in box soda syrup is available at Sams, Coke, Pepsi, and others. It's not expensive when you consider that you get roughly 4000 ounces of soda out of a 5 gallon bib, and can make your money back in a reasonable amount of time. A 12oz serving using syrup from Sams, a twenty ounce cup, ice, lid, and straw should be under a quarter. Most places sell for a buck and a half around here. You may have to have a food mgmt license to sell it depending on your state as well.

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I would like to know as much as possible lol

This was back in 1998, a time period in which I was growing like crazy and taking any kind of deal I could get to set machines. (first mistake) I landed a deal with a tornado magnet manufacturer, mobile home builder. :rolleyes: It was in Buda Tx, about 50 miles one way (second mistake). As part of the deal I agreed to put in a post-mix machine (third mistake) as I knew absolutely nothing about them. Installed 2 snack, 1 cold food, 3 soda, 1 coffee and the post-mix machine. I can't remember if it was an old Vendo or Rowe that was the first one I bought and had been refurbished. To keep this relatively short, lets just say that after making numerous service call trips out to the plant for the machine I learned that I needed to spend 30 minutes to an hour in front of the machine cleaning and testing everything to make sure it worked correctly every time. Had problems with cups, mixes, syrup leaks, water leaks, mixes out of whack, ants, you name it, everything that could go wrong did. Finally, in a last ditch attempt to save the account I bought another machine which was not quite as problematic but still was very time consuming to deal with. After a couple of months of struggling it seemed that things were finally smoothing out ......... until one of the managers found a cockroach floating in his drink.

Granted some of the problems were self inflicted but one of the lessons learned was to stick with what you know. Especially if you don't have the time and resources to learn something new. So that's the Cliff notes version of why I will NEVER have a post-mix machine again.

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I cant advise you to get or not to get a fountain machine.I can tell you the one we have at work has an issue every year and a half and the one before it never did the years we had it,although I didnt work there from day one that machine was installed,but it was there for a few years before we got a differant one.the brand we have is cornelious.finished product is about 1-2 cents an ounce.pure profit.to break even for that 2 dollar soda you buy at kfc you need to drink 100 oz of it to "get your moneys worth".

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Oh wow lol. They also want a coffee machine. Maybe I could just do the coffee machine and see if I can give the fountain drinks to Coke to handle since I am familiar already with that. Does anyone have any experience with getting fountain equipment from Coke? Do they even lend them out like 3rd party machines?

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