Thank you everyone for tuning into another episode of the Embit podcast, and I'm your host, Seamus Madan. I started this podcast at fifteen years old in December 2020 to bring personal finance education to the next generation. Now I am sixteen years old and the podcast has evolved to interviewing entrepreneurs BCs, GPs, and founders of public companies, all of which are designed to delve into insights that have not been shared elsewhere for the next generation of those interested in business.
Recently, I ventured into the VC space as a venture fellow at blitzscaling ventures which is backed by the co founder of LinkedIn. And I am interviewing those farther along in their journey to learn more on everything that I and the audience is curious about. If any of the above sounds interesting to you, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend. And now back to the show.
So today, Matt Bahar, the CEO of Cana, joins the podcast to discuss how Cana 1 is revolutionizing the beverage industry while making a positive impact on the environment at the same time. Before Canon, Matt was the director of digital support over at Nike and VP of product management at the home security company event. So first off, thank you, Matt, for taking the time to join the show. It's a pleasure to have you here today. Yeah. Shamus, thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat. Same here.
So right before you started, Hannah, as we mentioned, you were the VP of product management. For Vivint. And what was your experience like over there? And, how did you get into Canada? Yeah. So Vivint was a great experience. You know, maybe not the most well known company, right, in the US, but the largest provider of smart home services. And in the US. And what I learned from Vivint was a couple of really key things. One was they were a, p backed company.
And they had done everything really in, like, an amazing, like, DIY supergritty way. They were the most well funded startup, you could say, And I think that was one one amazing thing. That was from, you know, Todd Peterson. He was the CEO at the time, but I was there all the way down throughout the company. They just had this really, like, gritty, get it done, you know, grind it out bootstrap kinda way, and I thought that was awesome. Be part of that culture.
And then I think the other thing too is they had a real, like, underdog mentality. You know, no one really knew who Vivint was, and they were okay with that. But they wanted to prove, you know, a little bit of a chip on their shoulder, prove everybody wrong. And then I think the third thing was that I took that I learned there was that they had a very contrarian approach to smart home.
You have nests of the world producing these really sexy, amazing thermostat time and getting bought by Google for 3,000,000,000, and here's Vivint who's doing smart home as a service. And it turns out that monthly service revenue or, you know, ARR is much more valuable for a business than selling just one piece of hardware that over the lifetime of a customer probably has negative negative profit.
So so I I think I learned a lot about just kind of some fundamentals of of how to just succeed for, from taking a startup mentality, but also maybe a contrarian view to how how to bring a product to market. And you went from athleisure to smart homes technology. How did you get interested in science and technology? Yeah. I've always, you know, to be honest, I kind of fell into it a little bit backwards. So, you know, I actually, what it was is played basketball in college.
And so EA Sports, they would go from campus to campus and they would recruit game testers. And I started testing NBA Live, EA Sports, in Vancouver, British Columbia, and I thought it was the coolest place to work. And at the time, I'll be really honest. I didn't even know the difference between EA Sports making games on it. On the disk versus Microsoft and Sonya's first party software. I had no no idea between the 2 till I started working there.
And so once I got to EA, and I started learning about this this idea of software development and entertainment around games and software, I just became, like, a little bit obsessed with it. And from there, I always just leaned into technology, and I've always just tried to be on, like, the bleeding edge, like what's next, what's happening. And so that took me from games.
And at the time, I was doing, like, online gaming, you know, before there was any sort of you know, well known, even the I was in the metaverse. I felt like before there was even a thing with online communities. And then that took me to Nike where I did connected apparel and SmartShares just was like, hey. This, you know, I think Fitbit was the only company in the that had been out doing trackers yet.
And so at Nike, I worked on a fuel band in Nike plus basketball, which were smart connected apparel, and I thought that would just be the most amazing thing to be able to walk around and get an idea of, like, how my body's performing and how I should take 10,000 steps a day. And then at the same time, when I was at Nike, I saw this wave of IoT coming and specifically in the smart home. So I guess that's a a decade now ago, I that's when I jumped over to Vivint.
So I've always just been really curious about the next thing, and I always am curious about it because I get to talk to interesting people. I'm really lucky to ask a lot of questions, and some of that sparks interest into new areas of the technology is is starting to to take over and try to just stay as, you know, up to date and on cutting edge as possible as a result of that understanding. Yeah. And speaking of the neck thing.
Gen Z has said that climate change is one of the most important issues of their generation right now. And over at Canada, you're working to change the beverage industry Let's start off with what the current problem with the beverage industry is and how it operates. Yeah. So you have this massive scaled up infrastructure.
What it does is it gets beverages from point a to point b. Point a being you grow the ingredients you have to process, you have to cultivate, you manufacture them at a factory, you process them there, you have to package them, then you distribute them, you know, you them around, and all of that is built on centuries old infrastructure. So you gotta use a lot of water to grow all the ingredients.
You use a lot of and you emit a lot of CO2 to process and manufacture, you use a lot of water to process as well create those beverages. And then you emit a lot of CO2 and you create a lot of packaging and bottle waste when you're distributing. And then when you and I are drinking the beverages, so all those steps in that current process are were never built in a way that could be the most sustainable possible. They were just built in a way to hit scale.
So they're actually pretty impressive because they're gigantic. You know, 100 of, like, 1,000,000,000,000 of bottles and cans are created every single year. But as a result of us drinking the beverages that we drink, we use, you know, 100 of millions of liters water, essentially the size of lake Erie every single year to create the beverages that we drink, but it was never thought of, like, how can we do it in a, in a, in a better, more sustainable way.
So the problem is it's just scaled up, and it's terrible for the environment. And specifically, it's contributing if you put a a microscope on or magnifying glass on the beverage industry, it is a a silent, but huge contributor to the single use plastic waste that is, you know, washing up on our shores and on our lakes and rivers in our lakes and rivers and contributing to a global trash crisis.
So that's the problem that we're going after and we're trying to solve, and that gives you an idea of the scale of it. For sure. And all the time we talk about founders who are solving solutions to current problems. And now that we understand the problem, how is Hannah or Hannah won the solution? Yeah. So what we've done is we've looked at all the steps in that process, and we've essentially said, how can we eliminate as many steps as possible to then shrink the amount of of waste. Right?
And so what we figured out is, well, this doesn't actually something we figured out. Once I say, you'll it'll be pretty obvious, but all those containers in bottles that we're moving from point a to point b, on average, 90% of what is in one of those containers as water. And so taking a soda as an example, 99% of what's in that can or a little bit more is water, and about 1% are these really unique ingredients that give that beverage its flavor and its aroma.
And so If you have water in your home already and water is the main ingredient in any beverage, average 90%, how can we just ship you that other you know, 1%. How can we create that 1% and get it to your home? And so what we've done is before we've taken inspiration from Star Trek, Right? And we've essentially created a Star Trek replicator. We call it the Cana 1, and it's the world's first molecular beverage printer.
And what it does is it puts every ingredient that you would need, and there's about a 150 of them, any in of those ingredients. We put them into a cartridge and that cartridge provides about a month to 3 months' worth of beverage servings across coffee, tea, juice, soda, wine, cocktails, hard seltzers, energy drinks.
And that cartridge goes into our Cano 1 device, and we mix the most important ingredients, which are in our cartridge, with the water that's in your home, right, which is the main ingredient, and we produce beverages on demand and that that contain that cartridge because it has 100 and even thousands of servings, we don't use we we reduce the plastic waste by about 80% We reduced the water waste by about 80% and we reduced the CO 2 emissions by about 80%. That's super neat.
And we would have thought companies like a Keurig would have thought of a solution like this, but they haven't, and they haven't made one either. So how does the technicals of the product work if you can get into that just a little bit? Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's obvious that this that that the sustainability aspect of the current beverage infrastructure is a because Keurig is, in a way, trying to tackle that. They're just taking a bit of a different approach.
And to be honest, at the end of the day, it's not exactly maybe the most impactful. And SodaStream is doing the same thing. They're they're in that game. And because they know there's an opportunity there, but I think where they're falling down is they're only solving for one beverage type, either a carbonated soda or a coffee.
And so what we've done, technically, the the the the the breakthrough for us that we've created a universal set of beverage ingredients, and so that's what's in the cartridge. They're highly concentrated liquids. Those are like acids or sugars, you know, or vitamins that can go into any beverage. And what we figured out is all of those ingredients, they're actually shared between any beverage.
So the same ingredients that go into a wine are the same ingredients that go into a coffee or a tea or a juice. And what we figured out is how do you perfectly measure those and dispense them in the right amount so that you use the same ingredients to create one beverage and then you just modify the amount of them to create a different beverage.
And we figured out how to do that in our molecular beverage printer, and we figured out essentially what happens is we mix, you know, 50 plus different ingredients. We carbonate water. We chill the water, and we mix those ingredients with that carbonate carbonate and chilled water together in 30 seconds and we dispense it into a cup.
And so what's a Madan, that that's the breakthrough is we have a countertop molecular beverage printer that allows people to mix all those ingredients together, carbonate, chill them, and dispense them. That's that's, you know, highest level. That's how the that's how the device works. Gotcha. And 40% of households in the US own something like a Keurig or a single cup brewing system.
So there's obviously a large market to capture and even larger considering you're doing more than just the hot drinks as you said or more than just a sparkling water. And there's this law called Dorn Butch's law, which basically says that financial crises can take much longer to come than you think. And then they happened twice as faster than you would have thought. So do you think that we're gonna see a similar thing in terms of the growth of Cana? Yeah. I think so.
It's, yes, that's a interesting principle. Yeah. So, yeah, we'll be the, you know, the 10 year overnight success. I think what What is unique about Cana is we've essentially should think about it as, like, we've digitized beverages. Right? They're now recipes that live in the cloud, and it takes a bit of time to get there. It also takes a little bit of time to optimize them.
But what we've done on the other side is we've actually digitized the brand that goes that wraps around that beverage, right, and that is something we can do very fast. And once people find the beverage brand that they love, and that they want to have, and we then they'll start to consume more beverages from canna. And we can literally overnight, we can create, you know, a new beverage and a new brand, and that'll start to pull more people in.
And these beverage brands aren't your typical beverage brands. These are beverage brands around influencers and, you know, the next generation creators in the world, as well as your typical, you know, your your sports stars or even your sports team.
And so I think what you'll see end up happening is there's this massive long tail of beverages that have never been able to be served because they're restricted by the shelf space in a store, and we've completely blown that out of the water and provide an infinite shelf space, And as soon as people start to see that that long tail is introduced to to the public, there's gonna be more people consuming more beverage and the pie for beverages, the
beverage industry will expand, and that's where we'll see that expansion or that increase in the size of the beverage market that people probably weren't expecting when we first launched. And you mentioned how the number of beverages available on Cana or more than just than what you would see at a grocery store. Do you think the consumer or does the consumer have the ability to create or try to create their own drink from scratch?
Yeah. The way to think about canna is essentially the beverage aisle on your countertop. And what's awesome about having all those ingredients in that cartridge is that you can, you know, we can turn the power over to any consumer or any person to modify the amount of those ingredients people will be able to modify the amount of sugar, the amount of caffeine, the amount of alcohol to even be able to combine different flavors together. So if there's something you would try, you could do that.
You can even add vitamins and a different ingredients to beverages. So if you wanna do vitamin b, you wanna do vitamin you wanna do a multivitamin, you can do that into any beverage you want. And so that's the magic of having all the ingredients in one spot and turning that over to somebody. That's an amazing feeling. You're you're now the brewmeister. You're now the barista. You're now the mixologist. That's a magical experience for someone. That's super neat.
And you mentioned a little bit about this earlier about the climate impact. And I'm just scrolling through your website rise, it takes 600 liters of water to make a bottle of wine and 200 liters of water to make a glass of orange juice. And with these numbers being so high and so much resources being required, are you in conversations with getting any name brands like Coca Cola or Pepsi onto the platform That way they can reduce their environmental footprint. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.
We are a 100%. Those those 2 in addition to many others. I think all of them have you know, they feel the pressure from consumers, like you mentioned at the beginning, right, that sustainable brands are the brands that consumers wanna purchase from. And I actually don't think that's just limited to, you know, Gen Z or Gen X or whoever. I think actually everybody really wants that.
They wanna know hey, the morally the way that I think about the world, my brand thinks about the world the same Madan. And sustainability is a big deal. So Absolutely. That's what we can provide for those well known brands as well as others. We can reduce their their plastic waste. We can reduce their water waste. We can reduce their CO2 emissions as well. And we invite all of them actually to be on our platform and, you know, excited to actually give them that opportunity through Cana.
The product is super exciting with these machines or with machines like these. It's way more convenient than going to the store and all these bottles, which makes it easier for the consumers. How does the price range of canna drinks compared to that of bottled or canned beverages? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, this is think of this as, like, this is the the world's first, like, fully autonomous in home device. This is like your Teslas of the world.
So what we do is we automatically ship people the cartridge when they need it. Right? You it's completely hands off. It shows up at your doorstep. All you have to do swap those cartridges in and out. That's it. And we actually use the cartridge 12 times to reduce our carbon footprint and our waste even more. And then on 13th time, we actually recycle that that cartridge and we use it that plastic is parts in our device.
So we wanna make sure that we have a full round trip experience on our supply chain, but as well as your com it's a completely autonomous experience for you. And so As part of that service, everything just showing up automatic. The way it works is people pay for the device up front, but the our goal is to always have drinks that are 25 to 50 percent cheaper than what you would pay at retail. And that's our that's our goal for all of the different categories of of beverages.
So not only provide a more convenient experience, but provide something that's more cost effective for people in their home. And to wrap it up here, what are some of your takeaways on the beverage printing industry and where consumers who are interested about Cana can learn more about it. Yeah. So I think my my takeaways are that, you know, the there's a lot of modern, you know, instrumentation that exists out there for you to run analysis on what is in a beverage.
What is it really in, in any type of food, liquids are a starting point, a starting point. And you can really understand the chemical nature of something, and you can recreate it in a really safe way. As an example, like, we actually pull pesticides and heavy metals out of the wine that we make. So it's actually more of the health, you know, health conscious or health better health wise for people.
And so I think there's a future where this the the way that we're approaching things can really unlock a new way for just beverages, but food, dairy, milks, that kind of stuff to be to be produced in a better environmental way and in a healthier way. And so I think you'll see it progress there.
Think you'll see it progress there very quickly, not only as we figure things out at Canada, but as other companies do, and as the technology and the infrastructure actually matures some of the things that we use that we use internal. So so that's where I I I I see it going. And then I think if you wanna find out about canna, go to canna.com. Right, go there. We're taking preorders right now.
We've actually sold out of our 1st year's inventory, but there's still some gonna leave it up for a couple more days here for people to to get the, you know, they can pre order $99. I mean, you get a $300 discount $300 discount on the device, and we're gonna leave it up for a few more days. For people to to purchase, and you can find out everything you need there. And then if everyone has any questions, they can just, you know, there's a there's a contact us form there.
Please hit us up, and we we try to respond to everybody. That's awesome. Well, that's super interesting what you're doing over at Encana. I appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast. It's been a great conversation. Yeah. Thanks, James. I appreciate it.