The Soda Stream has always been a product that has left me baffled, I am still surprised that anyone would have wanted to make their own fizzy pop. Maybe those marketing executives at Soda Stream failed to notice the world wide dominance of brands like Coca Cola and Sprite:

“You can buy a can of this for less than 50p John and it takes fantastic”

“You say that mate, but I reckon Alan in his Kitchen in Peterborough can do much better”  

When I was growing up in the early 80’s the Soda Stream was massive. I remember my best mate having one, we used to just sit in his kitchen and look at it. It was true that fizzy drinks were relatively more expensive back then and supermarkets didn’t knock out their own brand muck so the Soda Stream seemed like a good alternative. Sitting their on the kitchen worktop, it did look like it was from the future. The whole idea was that you take water from the tap, put it into a Soda Stream bottle, pop it into the machine, which contained a gas canister and then push down the button to carbonate the water and “get busy with the fizzy” you could then add flavourings and voila! home made pop!

This was fine in theory, however in practice it was very different. My mate would always offer me one of his “concoctions” made via a Soda Stream. They were usually flat, lukewarm and tasted like Calpol. It was too much like hard work, its like offering someone a glass of milk and bringing in a cow on a rope, “fancy a glass of wine?” “get yer shoes and socks of then I’ve got some grapes upstairs in the bath”

Amazingly the Soda Stream is still in production, focussing on healthier drinks and sparking waters, there have been protests and boycotts of the product over the years. It was controversially headquarted in Mishor in the west bank of Israel, so not only is it a pointless product, its a barrier to peace.