Panera bread basically did and a few people died, so that probably didn't help.

Costs. These types of machines are generally free refills. You take a 32oz coke, and say actual cost to the store for you getting that coke is about 15 cents. You paid $2.30. Most people get 1 refill. But even if you get multiple, they still make profit.

I don't know wholesale costs of monster, but I know a 20oz bottle in stores here costs about $2. While a 24oz can of monster costs about $9.

It wouldn't surprise me if a 32oz fountain of monster cost the store like $0.70 wholesale. So there's no way they could make profit if people got multiple refills.

Plus, if you try to sell the monster at a higher cost than coke, what would stop someone from dumping the coke, and refilling with monster? Paying the lower innitial price, and now getting refills.

The inevitable howling from Karens when their children get ahold of a 64 ounce Big Gulp of the stuff notwithstanding, the main issue is that fountain availability would pull back the curtain on the supposed value of energy drinks. These are no more expensive than Coke or Pepsi or Sprite for their bottlers to produce, but they've successfully bamboozled the public into believing that a Monster or a Red Bull or whatever is "worth" 4-6x more per ounce than a normal soda. This is obviously bullshit, but if you were able to dispense it at the same rate and the same price as normal soda the jig would be up and the energy store brands would have an absolute cow.

There at least used to be, and I got royally screwed by it.

The employee hooked the wrong "orange" syrup up to the dispenser, and what I thought was 32oz of Orange Crush (caffeine free) was 32oz of some Orange energy drink. Needless to say, I was up all night and ended up having to call off work the next day because I was so exhausted and useless (I'm very sensitive to caffeine).

Probably also less common due to liability. Panera got into hot water with their highly caffeinated lemonade.

There's no technical reason why you couldn't. It's probably just some stupid marketing reason like:

• A. Monster doesn't want to sell its concentrate this way.
• B. They do, but not at a price that would justify including it as an option among other common self serve beverages.
• C. Stores don't want to offer unlimited access to dangerously high levels of caffeine after a Panera customer with a pre-existing heart condition drank about a gallon of caffeinated lemonade and then dropped dead in the dining room.

Probably liability and insurance.

What do you think would happen if you offered huge drinks, unlimited amounts or large capacity drinks of caffeinated, or energy supplements in a machine. What do you think a bored teenager with a bunch of his friends on a Friday night would do? They'd try to drink five gallons of Monster Energy just to see what would happen.

Someone would suffer a heart attack or some medical emergency and lawyers would have a field day milking concerned parents and restaurants with access to millions in insurance.

QT has Rooster Booster

Didn't Panera kill someone with one of those?

Go to AM/PM, bruh. They got energy drinks on the fountain. Mostly their own brands, but sometimes they have monster or rockstar depending on location.

QuikTrip has RoosterBooster

My guess has a few factors to it (in no particular order):

Cost soda syrup is likely a lot cheaper than the chemical concoction for energy drinks.

Safety Energy drinks pose a much greater health risk if the concentrations are off. Companies would have to prevent young children from accessing the machines (if they are used in restaurants). They would also have to prevent customers from drinking too much. I can also imagine chugging a bunch of the syrup would likely kill you (it's bound to happen).

Flavor Control soda companies already accept and plan for the difference in fountain vs bottled sodas. I feel energy drink companies want as much control as possible to keep their brand image perfect.

Don't know about where you live, but in the EU, there's a hard upper limit on the caffeine concentration in drinks you can legally sell.
Any syrup designed to be watered down before you drink it would be above the limit and therefore illegal.

Not on the same scale obviously, but this exists.

Didn't they do that at Panera Bread and a few people died?

As much as i do consume energy drinks with a meal i do think we shouldn’t normalize it to much.

Also in a “restaurant” the strong flavor can be said to ruin the taste of the food. Though of course in practice we aren't going to these placed for fine dinning and often precisely to get a chemical fix the places themselves still like to uphold some perception of being cullinary.

Bars usually have redbull dispensers around here. But as others have mentioned, caffeine in bulk can do damage. I once went to a gas station and they had energy drinks on tap. I'm had a 48oz energy drink with energy shots. I TALKED WITH CAPS LOCK ON FOR 4 DAYS NON-STOP.

@TriflingToad I’d like one for scotch… or just straight-up everclear. <sob>

In addition to what everyone else is saying, a really good reason not to have energy drinks on a soda fountain, aside from the fact that the energy drink soda would cost far more than a regular soda, is that energy drinks contain a lot of caffeine and if they were on dispenser some idiot would go and fill up a 64 Oz energy drink and drink the equivalent to 5 to 8 Red bulls in a single sitting.

No gas station wants to deal with the legal ramifications of "exploding people's hearts because they are too stupid to understand that these things can be deadly", because if people are dumb enough to chug Red Bull until they die they are also dumb enough to sue because of the deaths.

If I were to guess... it's probably because the chemical makeup of energy drinks would damage the machine? Maybe it's more acidic or something?

TBH I am 100% guessing here, talking out my ass, having done ZERO research on the topic.