Fresh Blends® powered by Multiplex®

This year at the Restaurant Canada Show, we had the privilege of testing out the new Fresh Blends machine (made by Multiplex a division of Welbilt). This machine is the world's first, digitally innovative beverage platform with a stylish and narrow footprint that offers a large interactive and highly intuitive touchscreen for self-serve operations. Fresh Blends offers a full range of beverage options everything from shakes to smoothies, to frozen lemonade and iced coffees.

The machine is extremely user-friendly and quite simple to operate. You begin by placing your cup in the machine, then hit start to bring up a variety of drink categories. Each category can have 4-6 drinks that the user can choose from. Once you’ve selected the drink of your choice, the machine will dispense the appropriate amount of ice, water, and mix for your cup size. The drink will then slide over automatically, where it is blended. Throughout the entire drink process, the machine displays a progress wheel so the user knows exactly when their drink will be ready.

Fresh Blends has a built-in rinse cycle, so once a drink has been blended it will automatically rinse the area where the drink was made. This does not replace sanitizing, so owners will still have to wipe down the machine at the end of the night and follow the steps on screen to complete the sanitization cycle. If the owner does not complete the sanitization daily or weekly the machine will lock the owner out, preventing them from using the machine until sanitization is complete.

A huge selling feature of this product is the cloud-based analytics dashboard with a consumer app and loyalty programs. The visibility from a corporate perspective to see what's going on in each one of these machines is a huge bonus for many operators. The analytics include everything from how many drinks are being sold, what time of the day they were sold at, what size drinks are most popular, whether or not the machine is running out of the product, and it can even tell whether the product is expired. These tools are crucial to busy operators who are on the go and need to access these reports remotely.