Cana Technology was in the process of building a home beverage appliance that could fully customise drinks and fight waste pollution, but has halted production and shut its doors due to a lack of funding.

Several former employees of Cana posted on linkedIn recently about the company shutting down, expressing frustrations over the situation.

“Despite developing a fully functional product and securing brand partners, Cana unfortunately faced a lack of critical funding necessary to build a production line for manufacturing and shipping devices. This resulted in the difficult decision to shut down,” one employee said.

“It was a privilege to work at Cana. The Cana team will always be a source of inspiration for me. Their passion, dedication, and hard work will continue to motivate me to strive for excellence every day.”

Not ready for rollout

The business shuttering comes abruptly on the heels of Cana revealing in March that Sir Patrick Stewart would be its new brand ambassador. The partnership led with the mission to help end the global trash crisis.

“The $2.5 trillion global beverage and bottling industrial complex revolves around the centralized production and distribution of a product that’s mostly water, using an archaic system that generates trillions of tons of trash,” Cana said.

Stewart, of Star Trek fame, said that Cana’s initiatives reminded him of “advancements in technology that for some may have only been conceivable in the world of science fiction.”

The startup first announced its prototype in early 2022, claiming that the appliance could “print” thousands of beverages like soft drinks, iced coffee, wine and cocktails. The company planned to ship customised carts directly to customers that contained a small percentage of ingredients that could create unlimited variety when combined with water.

Cana /confirm/ied that its first product offering would be called Cana One, “a molecular beverage printer that serves thousands of beverages on demand – without the plastic, aluminium or glass packaging of conventional beverages.”

Cana One had a price tag of $899 and Cana said it would begin shipping in the fourth quarter of 2023. The company additionally intended to offer a Creator Studio software platform that allowed customers to formulate and distribute new beverages from scratch.

Cana struggled to secure enough funding to see these plans through, however. It received $30 million in capital in 2022, but the company laid off 16% of its staff last summer, according to Bloomberg. Although, Cana appeared to be growing as of early 2023, and still has job postings for scientists and engineers currently listed on its linkedIn page.

The reaction to Cana’s mission was mostly enthusiastic from those in the beverage, technology and sustainability industries, but it also garnered a healthy dose of scepticism.

Tech journalists wrote about hesitations in the marketplace for yet another smart beverage appliance when consumers already have Keurigs, Nespressos and Soda Streams cluttering up their kitchen counters. Consumers are spending more than ever on small kitchen gadgets, driven by health, convenience and sustainability.

The Cana machine was also quite tech-forward, complex and expensive, and many worried it would have to overcome too big of a learning curve before gaining mainstream popularity in a crowded market.