Dining Services’ summer installation of an RFID-based soda fountain system has caused quite a stir across campus recently. The system’s efficacy is currently being examined by dining services, amidst student questions about whether the system is truly beneficial for “sustainability,” as dining services posits, or whether it’s simply a cash grab based on assumptions about patron behavior.

The system, developed (and patented) by the startup foodservice company ValidFill, is made up of several components. ValidFill’s soda fountains use microcontroller-based electronics to scan and interpret information stored on RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags placed in drinkware (manufactured by Whirly Drink Works) or on stickers attached to plastic cups. The RFID tag stores information including a patron ID (associated with your name and personal information), dates describing when it was last used, the number of fills remaining on the account and a secret number (used to ensure the security of the system.) If a patron has fills remaining, the machine allows soda to be dispensed.

The network-connected fountains enable data collection about who drinks what sodas, when they do so and where they purchase it. Integrated with the vast amounts of student information available to dining services, the system gives them the ability to derive very specific metrics such as the amount freshmen spend on Sprite during the weekends in BD. This accounts for much of the program’s value: the ability to observe student choices and to market or adjust service to those customers based on that data.

Data collection of this nature, of course, is nothing new. Digital point-of-sale systems have made such analytics available for years, but did not include the control structure around purchases ValidFill’s system creates. By policing the dispensation of soda at a microscopic level, the program betrays the lengths to which Dining Services is willing to go to save money.

ValidFill has had a presence on college campuses since 2014, when they installed a system at Binghamton University in New York. Their sales video goes to great lengths to emphasize the profitability of the system and the extent to which it promotes soda consumption. The flashy, attractive Coca-Cola Freestyle stations help students, in the words of Jim Ruoff, the Binghamton Dining Services manager, “see the value in it” and enables them to “upsell” students to their prepaid tier. “The plus for us, though, is that every time they come here, they seem to spend a little more money,” Ruoff says.

In another video focusing on the system they installed at the University of Vermont, students interviewed by ValidFill emphasized that their prepaid bottles made it more convenient for them to purchase the speciality pseudo-bottled-water options available at the Freestyle stations.

https://youtu.be/WGAGEWDjIAQ?t=34s0:34-2:50

Sustainability is a theme across all of ValidFill’s marketing materials, as it is in WU’s dining services campaign, but is a system that incentivises the installation and use of soda fountains, soda concentrates, flavorings, chemicals and all of the production and shipping footprint associated with those products truly more environmentally friendly than, say, a program designed to discourage soda consumption in the first place?