US 6,759,072 · Granted 2004-07-06

The Patent Behind On-Demand Custom Drinks You Design Yourself

Imagine a machine where you tell it exactly how you want your drink made — what flavor, how strong, how much water — and it builds it fresh in seconds. This patent covers the whole system: the touchscreen menu, the brain that figures out your recipe, and the hardware that mixes, dilutes, and filters ingredients on the fly, all without pre-mixing anything.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a beverage system with three core parts working together: a user interface where you customize your drink, a control system that stores your preferences and calculates the exact formula you want, and the actual delivery hardware that executes delayed dilution, mixing, and filtering in any order to create your customized beverage. What's protected here is the combination of these parts and the method of letting consumers design their drink in real time, then making it fresh to order.

Why it matters

This patent, filed by Procter & Gamble in 2000 and granted in 2004, represents an early technical approach to the customizable beverage machine space. At that time, most drinks came pre-formulated in bottles or powders. The patent's innovation was the idea of delaying all the mixing, dilution, and filtering steps until after a consumer inputs their preferences — meaning every drink is made bespoke on demand. This kind of system-level approach to customization became a blueprint for later at-home drink dispensers and commercial beverage stations.

Real-world use

If you've ever used a machine where you pick flavors, intensity levels, or ingredients from a screen and watch it mix a custom drink seconds later, you're using technology descended from this patent's core idea.

Original USPTO abstract

System for making and delivering a customized beverage product to a consumer having a user interface, a customization director in communication with a customization data store and the user interface, wherein the customization director includes executable instructions for determining a user's customized formulation; and a beverage delivery system in communication with the customization director, wherein the beverage delivery system includes executable instructions for delivering a customized beverage product. Method for delivering a customized beverage product to an individual including the steps of obtaining consumer preference data; determining a consumer beverage formulation corresponding to the consumer preference data; and providing the consumer a customized beverage corresponding to the customized beverage formulation, utilizing one or more of delayed dilution, delayed mixing, and delayed filtering, in any order.

Patent details

Publication number: US 6,759,072
Filing date: 2000-08-14
Grant date: 2004-07-06
Assignee: The Procter + Gamble Co.
Inventor(s): GUTWEIN ROGER WILLIAM, CONNOR CHRISTOPHER WADE
CPC class: G06Q20/327

View original record on Google Patents →

Want to file your own patent?

Designing your own kitchen gadget or beverage mixer? Use our free patentability scanner to see what's already locked down in your space.

Free patentability scan