Coca Cola's secret recipe revealed?

[philk]

Interesting if it's true but ultimately Coke's strength lies in its worldwide brand[1] and distribution rather than having an unreproducible taste.

[1] Of course, being able to say only two people know how to mix the 7X flavoring ingredient is part of that brand.

[akashs]

Well, yes and no. Completely agreed on your basic point that their strength lies in their brand. However, in 1985 when Coke tried to reformulate the original formula and create "New Coke", one thing that it showed was that the taste of the drink was very linked with the brand.

Coke has always built their brand by associating the drink with happiness and good memories, and when that taste changed, people were upset because the Coke they grew up with no longer existed.

But I doubt anyone would be able to steal share away from Coke simply by copying their formula.

[antidaily]

Yeah but have you noticed how generic brand cola doesn't taste nearly as good?

[tptacek]

I listened to this show over the weekend (if you don't listen to TAL, you should start immediately), and as I recall it, they were pretty unambiguous about the fact that people who routinely drank Coca Cola were, by a large margin, able to tell real Coke from this recipe.

The spokesperson ("archivist") they found from Coca Cola implied that stories like this come up all the time.

[powrtoch]

I don't suppose they had any original recipe Coca-Cola to test it against? It's hardly surprising that it would taste different since modern coke uses a different recipe.

[adestefan]

I don't see anything about carbonation levels. Dissolved CO2 has a unique taste and the amount contributes directly to the taste of the finished product.

[alizaki]

Coke could open source their cola tomorrow and nothing would change. I dont get this fascination with their secret recipe. Their strength is distribution and marketing of course. It would be the equivalent of Nike telling you how to make a shoe.

[ROFISH]

The fact that "the Coke formula is secret" is a marketing tool itself. I've seen a few ads along the line of "only two guys know the Coke formula and they each only know half." (Which I'm betting isn't true, since that makes Coke a bus factor of one.)

[kenjackson]

Coke could open source their cola tomorrow and nothing would change.

It depends on what the recipe is. If they're extracting some ingredients from cow dung then I think it could hurt them.

[axod]

The "secret recipe" is simply marketing. It gets them in the news every so often, and makes the public believe it can't be replicated by competitors.

IMHO Coke tastes horrible. Can't stand the stuff. Only Pepsi Max will do.

[tptacek]

Your first sentence is clearly and obviously true, but that doesn't make the story any less newsworthy.

[goatforce5]

Pret a Manager (normally shortened to plain ol' "Pret") is a premium sandwich/coffee chain based in the UK. They have stores in Manhattan and other places too. I miss it desperately.

Pre-packaged sandwiches are normally considered a bit ghetto and nasty. Pret used to (maybe they still do... I dunno...) print the recipe for the sandwich you were eating on the side of the box so that you realised you were getting good quality ingredients and a fair amount of effort went in to what you were eating.

Seems as though Pret realised what you were buying was not so much the product itself, but the convenience.

[markszcz]

Reminds me of OpenCola http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink)

Am I the only one or does anyone else hate the unnecessary popup ad on time.com?

[MikeCapone]

"If you gave me $100 billion and said, 'Take away the soft-drink leadership of Coca-Cola in the world,' I'd give it back to you and say it can't be done." -- Warren Buffett

[troymc]

I'm not a chemist, but can't one just run Coca Cola through a mass spectrometer to determine the relative amounts of, say, the top 15 molecules (by their masses), then do some further sleuthing (e.g. X-ray diffraction studies of the component molecules) to determine what those 15 molecules are?

[powrtoch]

Seems like this would be about as informative as looking at the assembly code for Firefox.

[ars]

If they used pure isolated ingredients then yes. But they don't - they use plant extracts which contain hundreds if not thousands of molecules.

[tertius]

Problem is, recombining.

Since you're not just using raw chemicals to produce the final product reproducing it is very expensive if this is the way that you're going about it.

[oiuyuiopiuy]

The ingredients aren't a secret - they are published by the people that certify stuff as kosher for example, or by equivalents of FDA in some countries.

Of course the proportions and mixing might be secret - but really it's coke's brand and ubiquity that is their 'secret'.

[justincormack]

This recipe was published years ago in the book For God, Country and Coca-Cola by Mark Prendergast. He found it in the archives while researching the book. It is not the current recipe, as some changes have been made.

Its an excellent book too, with the history of the new coke fiasco and the early years.

[ComputerGuru]

I'm disturbed by the fact that the 7X flavor contains alcohol - there's a lot of people that can't drink something lik this for religious reasons... I wonder if it is real.

[joezydeco]

That alcohol probably isn't in the true 7X formula these days.

There is a trace amount of alcohol in Coke as a byproduct of the Corn-to-HFCS conversion. Because of this grain byproduct, Coke produces a Kosher version of Coke around the jewish holidays that uses cane or beet sugar (sucrose) instead of high-fructose corn syrup. I grab as much K-Coke as I can during the passover season and hoard it all year. It's good stuff.

[jobrahms]

The article said that this was the original recipe, which the article also said contained alcohol. The article also said that as prohibition started, the alcohol was removed. So says the article.

[Avshalom]

2 oz of alcohol to 5 gallons of syrup, and syrup is diluted further.

That said, basically all liquid flavorings are alcohol solutions. The 1 oz vanilla probably adds as much alcohol as the 7X does. And I suspect that the Mormons and Muslims are okay with vanilla extract.

[JoeAltmaier]

Also coca! This is the original recipe remember. So no probably not any alcohol in modern Coke.

But it IS in your vanilla extract etc.

[jonknee]

It also contains Coca extract... This obviously isn't the modern day recipe.

[markszcz]

I like cooking and would love to make a coca cola duplicate but the flavor thats comes from the Coca extract could be a little hard to come by.

"They identified the Illinois-based Stepan Company as the importer and processor of the coca used in Coke. " http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/01/business/how-coca-cola-obt...

[eli]

You should listen to the This American Life broadcast. Search Coca Tea on Amazon.

[ck2]

A better news story linked on that page is how four loko is being recycled into ethanol, lol

http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/01/07/four-lokos-silver-lining...

I'm against ethanol (because of corn welfare for millionares) but it's still an eye opening story.

ps. What's up with Time trying to be "hip" to the Reddit/Digg crowd?

[ffffruit]

Wouldn't this be equivalent to somebody finding out Google's exact ranking weights from 2005 ?

The recipe has changed/been tweaked alot & the true strength of Google is now in its worldwide brand rather than its ranking algorithm.

[mahrain]

Pick up a can of Coca Cola and you can already see the recipe is incomplete. In the EU it clearly lists E338 (Phosphoric Acid) as an ingredient, which is not shown in the recipe at Time.com.

[hornokplease]

Related: This American Life's server crashed today under the load driven by the story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222841

[antihero]

The only way I see this as being useful is to make your own cola that is less damn sweet. But for that there's open cola or whatever it is I guess.

[adestefan]

That's pretty easy to do. There are numerous companies that make different flavored soda extracts that are just flavorings. You mix them with sugar and 4-5 gallons of water. To carbonate you can either use yeast in plastic bottles or hook it up to a CO2 tank.

I regularly make root beer this way and put it in my kegerator. I usually put in about half the sugar than what the extract calls for.

[StrawberryFrog]

Why would you want to go digging through old documents for the recipe when you could use a chromatograph?

[tankenmate]

I always thought that cola had lavender as one of its ingredients..

[deadmansshoes]

We need some more secret sauce. Put this mayonnaise in the sun!

[marknutter]

I'm a little upset it's not alien slug feces.

[camiller]

Mmmmm... Slurm