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Food Service and Other Commercial Applications The potential size and profitability of the worldwide market for decentralized, distributed, small scale water treatment units in the soft drink, ice-making and coffee-making industries (so called "commercial, distributed end-user" applications) is colossal. There are a number of companies that produce various products and services for this broad, worldwide industry, and they are endeavoring to expand the worldwide market for soft drinks and clean water. They believe that the ubiquitous availability of very low cost, decentralized, site specific water purification equipment will augment and expand traditional markets, increase profitability, and give them a leg up on their competitors. In particular, they are keenly aware that companies such as Coca Cola or Pepsico may not be realizing their full market or margin potential in developing countries and other venues because of low water quality problems that restrict decentralized fountain drinks in favor of bottled and distributed drinks. Large soft drink companies can increase sales markedly and reduce costs of delivery markedly if they can get effective point of use purification and sterilization. Probably the primary limitation against capturing an even larger market-share by soft drink, coffee, tea, and other commercial water vendors is the abysmally low water quality in many foreign countries. The United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and a few others have built modern, integrated municipal water systems for wide distribution to homes and businesses, and the quality of American water systems is uniformly quite good. However, developing country water systems have proven to be less advanced. Soft drink vendors such as Coca Cola, Pepsico, and Dr. Pepper impose stringent quality restrictions on anyone who wishes to deliver their products through fountains. Consequently, water treatment systems are needed that can function on a decentralized basis at the point of distribution to insure that the final products (i.e., Coca Cola, Pepsico, ice, coffee, etc.) are at the highest quality possible and are not contaminated with either organic or chemical agents. Distributed water consumers have envisioned placing a new, inexpensive system that treats incoming water by removing the salts, organics, microorganisms, and other constituents that may alter the taste, aesthetics, or health of the final product. A key part of their vision is the invention of a small, inflatable, onsite reservoir tank (a "bladder") that can be used to store purified water for use in soft drink dispensers, ice-makers, coffee brewers, and other low volume decentralized uses. The inclusion of such a system would insure that all users of the products that they sell would meet or exceed quality standards put forth by Coca Cola, Pepsico, Starbucks, or other companies and that they could profitably sell equipment to them (as contrasted with pre-bottled soft drinks). They believe that these large retail vendors have profound incentives to buy the Reticle CDI configuration. Reticle CDI has the potential to serve precisely the small commercial decentralized water need--to completely and inexpensively sterilize and deionize water at small size, decentralized locations to serve small scale, decentralized, single establishment use. Reticle capacitive deionization units have already been shown to remove even minute quantities of chlorides, iron, calcium, bicarbonates, carbonates, and all dissolved species to levels that are not detectable by conventional analytical techniques, and we have proven the process with drinking waters as well as industrial waters. The Reticle process also neutralizes the water pH by removing both hydrogen and hydroxide ions. Neutralization of the pH in this fashion should ameliorate the problem well known in the soft drink industry that alkalinity (and to a lesser degree acidity) in water absolutely ruins the taste of soft drinks and daunts sales. Preliminary testing has shown that complete ion removal can be accomplished with a minimal amount of power consumption (0.36 kW-hr/1000 gal or lower), a dramatic operating cost savings over other techniques (such as RO or distillation). Why in the world would Coca Cola, Pepsico, Starbucks, or other mass distributors care about distributed dispensing of soft drinks (e.g., "fountain Coke") versus bottled and distributed product. The answer is very clear. Shipping bottles and other bulky, high volume, low density products such as cans or bottles of product is expensive and erodes their profit margins. (Why do you think fountain preparation of soft drinks has become so prevalent in the United States? It is higher margin!) In developing countries, there is pressure to minimize purchase prices so as to accumulate market share and aggregate sales volume. Decentralized dispensing is a key way to reduce production and distribution costs. If vendors can maintain price, they increase margin. If they reduce price, they increase sales and perhaps increase aggregate margin. This is why the "big boys" are motivated to move toward decentralized "fountain Coke" distribution; it cuts their cost. This is why Reticle is ideally positioned to serve the small commercial market for water purification. |
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