[notjulianjaynes]

One issue with those machines is the sweetener is mixed with the flavor ingredients at the fountain. That's how they fit all those flavors in a refrigerator size package. Each flavor pack is about the size of a box of mike and ikes, but there's also a "bib"(2.5 gallon bag in box)[1] of non-nutritive sweetener that's shared by all the diet flavors. Corn syrup gets routed in from a big tank in the back along with water and c02.

In practice if you wanted some kind of home setup, you'd be much better off just buying the normal box of syrup like they use in fast-food restaurants, gas stations, etc.

[1]https://www.ebay.com/itm/184564418337

[ChuckMcM]

Wow, why am I not surprised :-). If the normal boxes had been reasonably priced when I was pursuing this I would have gone that route. At the time the best I could do was a bit under 0.02/oz based on the 24 oz bottles or 2 liter bottles depending on sales. The places that would sell me syrup had the result coming in at 4.2 - 6 cents/oz which would have increased my costs considerably.