IFA Berlin closed on 8 September after five days at Messe Berlin, and as usual the halls were dominated by screens, robot vacuums and things that promise to talk to your thermostat. Over in Hall 25, at booths H25-177/199, ORI Future was working on a narrower question: what actually happens in the twenty minutes between opening a bottle and handing someone a finished drink.
The answer the brand put on the floor was not a single appliance. It was a set of three tools, each assigned to one part of the experience — taste, visual presentation and aroma — with ORI MIX taking centre stage.
Taste | ORI MIX
The centrepiece was ORI MIX, an AI-assisted machine that sits on a countertop and does the measuring and mixing while leaving the finishing touches to whoever is hosting. What separates it from the pod-and-cartridge category is that it doesn’t ask you to give up your own bottles. The system connects directly to up to six spirits or liqueurs of the user’s choosing, in their original bottles, with no decanting into proprietary containers.
Flavour comes from a second channel. Rather than one capsule per cocktail, ORI MIX uses 15 ml modular Pods that act as building blocks — acidity here, sweetness there, an aromatic note on top — and the machine stores up to 54 of them, with four available at any one time.
The parts worth understanding, in plain terms:
- Inventory recognition through the app. Register your bottles, scan your Pods with a phone camera, and the app builds a live menu of what you can actually make tonight rather than a catalogue of what you can’t.
- A library, then a conversation. Behind the app, there are more than 1,000 ORI-certified recipes, including over 100 signature creations developed and reviewed by bartenders. ORI Future’s exclusive cocktail AI then analyzes your collection to propose cocktail variations or co-create something new.
- Four physical actions, not one. Build, Stir, Shake and Hard Shake are applied according to the recipe. A stirred drink gets a stirred drink’s dilution; a Hard Shake — the more vigorous, texture-driven technique used in Japanese bar culture — gets treated differently. Execution runs in under 60 seconds.
- Dosing accuracy within plus or minus 3 percent. That equates to a 45 ml pour that will land within about a millilitre of the target, the difference between a repeatable drink and a lucky one.
Crucially, the machine stops before the end. Ice and garnish stay with the person making the drink, which is a deliberate design decision rather than an omission — and it sets up the rest of the stand. Visitors who wanted the full technical picture were pointed to the ORI MIX smart mixology system pages for specifications and compatibility notes.
Visual Presentation | GLAZER
If ORI MIX handles what’s in the glass, the GLAZER clear-ice tools handle what you see in it. The line uses directional freezing, which is a straightforward idea dressed in technical language: water is frozen from one side only, so trapped air and impurities are pushed ahead of the freezing front instead of being locked into the middle as cloud. What’s left is clear ice.
From there it becomes a presentation choice. Spheres, diamonds and skulls were all on display at Hall 25, and the point ORI Future kept making was that ice is a design surface, not just a cooling agent.
Aroma | HALO Smoker
The third element addressed the part of a drink you notice before you taste it. HALO Smoker is a rechargeable, all-electric cold smoker with no butane or open flame. Its combustion process is fully enclosed within the device, while the smoke itself adds new layers of flavour and makes the finishing ritual part of the presentation.
Where the Technology Deliberately Stops
Underneath the product demonstrations was a position on automation that ORI Future stated repeatedly to visitors: technology should carry the tedious, repeatable parts of hospitality — measuring, timing, consistency — so the person making the drink has more attention left for the people they’re making it for. Creativity, presentation and the act of sharing stay human. Seen that way, the ORI Future home-bar ecosystem is less a replacement for skill than scaffolding for it.
That thinking has a traceable origin. ORI Future began in 2022 with a much smaller ambition: making clear ice, which home users found genuinely difficult to produce well, accessible in an ordinary domestic freezer. Ice led to shape, shape led to aroma, and aroma led to the drink itself. Its beginnings as a design-led technology company now read as the first step in a fairly logical progression.
For Trade Visitors and Distributors
Beyond consumer traffic, the Hall 25 stand drew retail buyers, distributors and hospitality professionals — a reflection of a category that has moved from novelty gadget to considered home investment. Approved show details, product specifications and on-site photography are available through the ORI Future Press Kit for editorial and trade use.
What Berlin showed was less a product launch than a thesis being tested in public: that a home bar can be systematic without becoming clinical, and that the last thirty seconds of making a drink are the part worth protecting.
