‘Go crazy and do two’: North Beach pop-up pumps out dirty sodas for free

To customize the perfect drink, the touchscreen at the Torani Flavor Factory pop-up in North Beach peppered me with questions. Do I prefer coffee or bubbly water? What’s my preferred sweetness level? My favorite season?

Behind the machine, a conveyor belt with gaudy fake desserts under glass domes was running slowly. I went for maximum wackiness, to see if it could come up with something borderline insane out of the company’s 150 or so flavors.

Well, I got Peanut Butter Blondie — up my alley, as it turns out. A barista handed me a stiff plastic cup with my recipe printed on the side: two pumps of peanut butter cup, two pumps of vanilla. I handed the cup to a second barista, who filled it with six ounces of cold brew, two ounces of milk, and some ice. My palate runs toward salty and bitter — boba at 25% sweetness is too saccharine — but I did not come to North Beach to feel sophisticated, and I had to admit it was delicious.

The customizable-drink kiosk is the main attraction at the Flavor Factory, a free, interactive experience open through Sunday. Comparisons to Willy Wonka invite themselves, but the ground-floor space on Powell Street is short on Oompa Loompas and heavy on QR codes. It’s a little like the Museum of Ice Cream, only the museum is a 100-year-old Bay Area icon that invented the flavored latte and claims to have never laid off a single employee. 

These days, Torani is big on “dirty sodas,” concoctions popularized by singer Olivia Rodrigo, legions of TikTok stars, and the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” who are evidently more comfortable with sex scandals than with caffeine. Making a dirty soda is as simple as adding half-and-half, coconut cream, or a dairy substitute to Coke or Pepsi, then squirting in whatever syrup flavor you like. In Utah, sugar-free coconut Torani is trending hard.

Some people were in on the craze before it was cool. Supervisor Danny Sauter, who represents North Beach, gets Italian sodas at Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe. “I will sometimes go crazy and do two,” he said at Thursday’s Torani media preview. “I’ll sometimes do cherry and coconut together.”  

There are other interactive exhibits: a station that pours more adult flavors like anisette and tamarindo, a wall of cocktail recipes, and a “Pouroscope” that forecasts your flavor when you tell it your birth month and year. (I got “lavender,” with no explanation why.) Overall, the Flavor Factory is as much for adults who want to pop in for a free drink as for kids who will thrill to the bright colors and sugar bombs.

According to Andrea Ramirez, Torani’s customer and consumer insights manager, Tamarindo was one of the five original Torani flavors — along with lemon, grenadine, anisette, and orgeat (now simply called “almond”) — but it came back from the dead a few years ago. Exposed to dishes and cuisines from Latin America and South Asia, Americans are suddenly gaga for tamarind, which balances sweetness and tanginess with a little bite. (It’s the best flavor of Jarritos, we agreed.)

But this is North Beach, so what about amaro? It turns out Torani used to make an herbaceous liqueur called Amer — as in Amer Picon, the bitter digestif — but last month, it sold the recipe to a distillery in Nevada. Unable to sneak myself a Picon Punch, I went back to the drink kiosk and answered every question differently than before.

The lime-raspberry Italian soda it handed me was no Fernet, but it did the trick.