I was going to say that I found it hard to believe that Coca-Cola was only manufactured in the USA, and ask how the export of coca leaves to other countries worked. Then I looked up Coca-Cola on Wikipedia and saw that "The company produces concentrate, which is then sold to licensed Coca-Cola bottlers throughout the world". So I guess it is only manufactured in the USA.
There's a recent trend for importing glass bottles of Coca-Cola from Mexico. The reason is that unlike American Coke, Mexican Coke has sugar rather than high fructose corn syrup. The reason American Coke has high fructose corn syrup is because of the US sugar tariff. So Mexican bottlers import American Coca-Cola concentrate, mix in carbonated water and some cane sugar of either Mexican or presumably Caribbean origin, and export the finished bottles of Coca-Cola back to the United States, simply to route around the damage of the US sugar tariff.
The book mentioned (For God, Country and Coca-Cola) is an excellent read, and very thorough. It actually includes the recipe in the back too(1). Coke has had many imitators over the years and fought vigourously to keep their name. They did want to stop using coca leaves, but that then loses meaning and protection for the "coca" part of the name.
In the early part of the 1900s they used to sell the product at soda fountains in malls etc. At one point two businessmen wanted to bottle it instead. Bottling at the time was not particularly advanced, product often spoiled, refrigeration wasn't widespread, and they are heavy. Coke figuring they had a couple of chumps then sold them worldwide perpetual exclusive bottling rights. Oops. Coke has managed to buy back around half of those rights from people around the world. You should look carefully at the bottles and cans. They usually tell you if they were produced under the authority of the Coca Cola bottling company (the company from those businessmen) or Coca Cola itself.
(1) Ok, so you have the exact recipe and can make something that is identical to Coke. What are you going to call it? How are you going to market it? Which retailers are going to buy it from you? How many years of funding do you have for lawyers?
Anyone can make a cola flavour drink. The hard part is marketing, logistics and sales. Heck there is even an open source cola to get your started:
The author doesn't seem to make the connection, but the Mallinckrodt Corporation's cocaine hydrochloride can also be found at your favorite neighborhood retailers as a white powder for ~$80 / gram. It's 'regular' cocaine.
And more specifically, Levamisole is becoming something of a hot topic as a dangerous, but desirable for its ability to pass most purity tests. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1955112,00.ht... is one overview. The DEA journal Microgram has covered it a few times as well.
I've long known that CocaCola affects me differently than most people. For a long time, I thought it was the caffeine in it, but then I drank Mt Dew (with more caffeine) and didn't have the same problems.
Basically, it's really addictive to me. If I start drinking it, I'll feel the need to drink more and more until I'm drinking enough that it makes me physically ill each day... And I will just continue.
It took me a while to get off it, and other caffeinated drinks do not affect me in the same way.
I didn't realized, until now, that they still used an extract from the coca leaf. That seems like it's different from every other drink out there, and maybe that's why it affects me differently. Hopefully this knowledge can help strengthen my resolve to stay off of it.
It's really sad, too, because I love the flavor. I just can't handle it.
Me too.
I highly suspect Coca Cola was specifically designed in a way that it can not quench one's thirst.
Once you open a bottle, you can not stop drinking it until it is finished.
That's why I completely stopped drinking Coca Cola few years ago.
I wonder if there's cola that is still made with active coca ingredients somewhere in the world. I believe chewing on coca leaves is legal in some parts of South America and cocaine is legal in some european countries... with the recent "boutique soda" craze, it must exist.
It is decriminalized in Portugal but that is not the same as being legal. I'm fairly certain that it is not legal in any European country and I know for a fact that it is in the EU controlled substances list and is not legal in the EU except for a very few and very narrow uses in medicine and pharmacology.
In Peru and Bolivia, coca leaves are sold just about everywhere. A good tasting tea is made from them, and people chew them while hiking on the mountains and so on. The effects are similar to caffeine. I didn't see any coca soft drinks there, though.
Sure, yeah, but lots of things you might want to do with a business require a permit or approval or waiver from the government. I'm not sure that is inherently unfair in practice.
Sounds like the Stepan Corporation has an effective monopoly on the manufacture of cocaine-free coca leaves. That really says nothing about a restriction on their use.
Tangentially, I want to note that Coke has a great marketing strategy! True or not, but "only two people who never travel together" makes the formula sound 1000x times better than "sugar water + stuff that's probably bad for you".
In fact, when I was about 13 yrs old, I remember going on a tour of Coke factory, where they showed us the movie about the process, including "historial" references to coke being made a 100+ years ago. For a kid, their marketing was better than Coke itself.
It would be great if Coke kept the same 'secret ingredients' instead of tainting them with the disgusting taste of high fructose corn syrup, which was not in the ingredient list. Coke is not serving coke as we know it, but 'new coke'.
Many studies have been done on the negative effects of HFCS, not evening considering it's inferior taste to organic cane sugar.
Stopped drinking any beverage product with High Fructose Corn Syrup, which means virtually every Coke product.
Both are made with real, honest-to-goodness sugar, not HFCS. They taste better and are a fun treat.
As a related note: There's a whole subculture of soda geeks (I presume you are as not-surprised as I was to discover this ;) and it's a fun mini-adventure to explore some of the things one can buy (i.e. vanilla coke w/ real sugar)
I dislike Pepsi, prefer Coke, most likely because I grew up outside the US and in the rest of the world Coke is sharper than in the US while Pepsi is sweeter. Even so, I've converted to Pepsi Throwback for the real sugar taste instead of Coke's nasty tasting HFCS formula here.
One can get pretty close to the coca-cola formula using chemical analysis. i think it would be a good documentary show to do this in CSI miami style, and i bet funding wouldn't be that hard to get :)
Also, I have no real way to confirm, but I've heard (via friend of a friend: suspicion +10) quite a big part of a high-value flavour science is not just now it tastes, but that it is hard to reproduce faithfully, by means of unnecessary extra additives, novel process control requirements, and unusual synergistic effects.
> Waste product from a Coca-Cola plant in India which the company provides as fertiliser for local farmers contains toxic chemicals, a BBC study has found.
Dangerous levels of the known carcinogen cadmium have been found in the sludge produced from the plant in the southern state of Kerala
The photographer Sharad Haksar had some trouble from Coca-Cola after using their brandname in some of his art.
Be cautious when importing foodstuffs. Sometimes they're not produced to the high standards you'd like. I'm not sure how reliable this source is (seems a bit flame-baity) but it suggests that Indian versions of some soft drinks (not just Coca-Cola) are high in pesticides.
> In blatant disregard for lives in India, the Coca-Cola company continues to sell products in India with high levels of pesticides even today. Coca-Cola maintains that its products in India are completely safe, and that it has one global standard for all its products.
> The reality, however, is very different. On at least 10 occasions since January 2005, the US Food and Drug Administration has rejected the shipment of Coca-Cola products made in India coming into the US, on the grounds that they do not conform to US laws and that they are unsafe for the US public.
---
[1] It is frustrating when the BBC uses their news programmes and websites to promote their other programmes. "Face the Facts" is a reasonable investigative programme. Here's the website for it:
> “only two people know how to mix the 7x flavoring ingredient”
To what extent are they allowed to keep this a secret? For example, I'm a vegetarian, so presumably they would have to declare if this secret ingredient contains animal products? (I'm sure it doesn't, it's just an example to portray the point).
And I'm guessing one of the people who knows the secret ingredient is Moe Syzlak?
Sounds like lore. Won't let them fly on a plane together? I hope they don't ride in the same car to the airport since that's even more dangerous. (see my point?)
It's possible only 2 people know it since 3 can't keep a secret. More likely anyone that knows it has signed NDAs on top of which they each know two versions of the same recipe with an indistinguishable flavoring difference due to a minor quantity differences. Either recipe were to get out it's obvious who leaked because the master copy is in the vault. The exact quantities are like a watermark that gives away the leaker. At any rate, if you have golden handcuffs you don't leak due to self preservation anyhow.
Coca Cola played an intricate role in race relations in 20th century America. The removal of cocaine from this popular beverage was not one of choice, but one required to help squelch concerns that the product lead to the degradation of society. Specifically increased violence from Blacks and miscegenation. I saw a documentary on it awhile back but can't remember the name. Here's a link that explains a little more http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/384/is-it-true-coca....
Honest question: Whats Coke and whats Coca-Cola. In some countries they sell it as "Coke". Here in Turkmenistan it's Coca-Cola. Is it a branding stuff? Or something different?
Maybe I've been watching too much Breaking Bad but there's a great opportunity here for someone to "acquire" the pre-processed shipments in Maywood NJ. Who wants to be my co-founder on this project? There's gotta be Pinkman out there to my Walter. C'mon!!!
Even if someone observing the flow of incoming and outgoing trucks could determine the ingredients and their precise proportions, it's the cooking method that produces the right taste, and someone who counts trucks won't be able to figure that out. You can sniff packets in my LAN all day long, but that won't tell you 100% of things that go on inside my computer. Tricking me to install spyware on my computer, on the other hand, is a completely different matter. If the Coca-Cola formula is known, it'll be because of corporate espionage and not something you can tell from publicly available data.
Indeed, I suspect it's pure marketing hyperbole. Even if only two humans currently know, the machines must know to mass-produce it. Their best-kept out-in-the-open secret in my opinion is the way they are involved (as are others) with things like murdered union leaders and generally poor living standards in places like Colombia and other nations.
"Bonus fact: Coca-Cola’s recipe contains a heavily guarded mystery flavoring, known as the “7X flavor.” In early 2011, This American Life broadcast an episode[1] discussing a potential early recipe for the drink, but almost certainly not the one in use today. Coke denied[2] that the program had discovered the true formula. In that episode, Mark Pendergrast, author of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, an unauthorized history of the company (and beverage), told This American Life[3] that “only two people know how to mix the 7x flavoring ingredient” and that “[t]hose two people never travel on the same plane in case it crashes; it’s this carefully passed-on secret ritual and the formula is kept in a bank vault.”"
[+] [-] simonw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|14 years ago|reply
There's a recent trend for importing glass bottles of Coca-Cola from Mexico. The reason is that unlike American Coke, Mexican Coke has sugar rather than high fructose corn syrup. The reason American Coke has high fructose corn syrup is because of the US sugar tariff. So Mexican bottlers import American Coca-Cola concentrate, mix in carbonated water and some cane sugar of either Mexican or presumably Caribbean origin, and export the finished bottles of Coca-Cola back to the United States, simply to route around the damage of the US sugar tariff.
[+] [-] rogerbinns|14 years ago|reply
In the early part of the 1900s they used to sell the product at soda fountains in malls etc. At one point two businessmen wanted to bottle it instead. Bottling at the time was not particularly advanced, product often spoiled, refrigeration wasn't widespread, and they are heavy. Coke figuring they had a couple of chumps then sold them worldwide perpetual exclusive bottling rights. Oops. Coke has managed to buy back around half of those rights from people around the world. You should look carefully at the bottles and cans. They usually tell you if they were produced under the authority of the Coca Cola bottling company (the company from those businessmen) or Coca Cola itself.
(1) Ok, so you have the exact recipe and can make something that is identical to Coke. What are you going to call it? How are you going to market it? Which retailers are going to buy it from you? How many years of funding do you have for lawyers?
Anyone can make a cola flavour drink. The hard part is marketing, logistics and sales. Heck there is even an open source cola to get your started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink)
[+] [-] desas|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelfeathers|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanLivesHere|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BCM43|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shabble|14 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_agent
And more specifically, Levamisole is becoming something of a hot topic as a dangerous, but desirable for its ability to pass most purity tests. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1955112,00.ht... is one overview. The DEA journal Microgram has covered it a few times as well.
[+] [-] aninteger|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|14 years ago|reply
Basically, it's really addictive to me. If I start drinking it, I'll feel the need to drink more and more until I'm drinking enough that it makes me physically ill each day... And I will just continue.
It took me a while to get off it, and other caffeinated drinks do not affect me in the same way.
I didn't realized, until now, that they still used an extract from the coca leaf. That seems like it's different from every other drink out there, and maybe that's why it affects me differently. Hopefully this knowledge can help strengthen my resolve to stay off of it.
It's really sad, too, because I love the flavor. I just can't handle it.
[+] [-] ivan78|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dot|14 years ago|reply
edit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/14/coca-colla-real-...
[+] [-] pilsetnieks|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedrolll|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
(http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/19/us-bolivia-coca-id...)
[+] [-] gerggerg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steve-howard|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nknight|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirillzubovsky|14 years ago|reply
Tangentially, I want to note that Coke has a great marketing strategy! True or not, but "only two people who never travel together" makes the formula sound 1000x times better than "sugar water + stuff that's probably bad for you".
In fact, when I was about 13 yrs old, I remember going on a tour of Coke factory, where they showed us the movie about the process, including "historial" references to coke being made a 100+ years ago. For a kid, their marketing was better than Coke itself.
[+] [-] TechNewb|14 years ago|reply
Many studies have been done on the negative effects of HFCS, not evening considering it's inferior taste to organic cane sugar.
Stopped drinking any beverage product with High Fructose Corn Syrup, which means virtually every Coke product.
see: http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
[+] [-] nlh|14 years ago|reply
A) Mexican Coca-Cola (sold in tall, skinny bottles: http://www.amazon.com/Mexican-Coca-Cola-Drink-12-Ounce/dp/B0...) B) Kosher Coca-Cola (only available around Passover in select markets like NYC & Miami - look for the yellow cap on 2-liter bottles)
Both are made with real, honest-to-goodness sugar, not HFCS. They taste better and are a fun treat.
As a related note: There's a whole subculture of soda geeks (I presume you are as not-surprised as I was to discover this ;) and it's a fun mini-adventure to explore some of the things one can buy (i.e. vanilla coke w/ real sugar)
See: http://www.sodafinder.com/products/coca-cola-coke-vanilla
[+] [-] Terretta|14 years ago|reply
Sugar vs HFCS Coke and Pepsi smackdown: http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2011/11/soda-the-pepsi-throwba...
[+] [-] ig1|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ippisl|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shabble|14 years ago|reply
http://www.rense.com/general7/whyy.htm
Also, I have no real way to confirm, but I've heard (via friend of a friend: suspicion +10) quite a big part of a high-value flavour science is not just now it tastes, but that it is hard to reproduce faithfully, by means of unnecessary extra additives, novel process control requirements, and unusual synergistic effects.
[+] [-] Alex3917|14 years ago|reply
Wouldn't Jeff Bezos be in jail then, considering that they are sold on Amazon?
[+] [-] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3096893.stm)
> Waste product from a Coca-Cola plant in India which the company provides as fertiliser for local farmers contains toxic chemicals, a BBC study has found. Dangerous levels of the known carcinogen cadmium have been found in the sludge produced from the plant in the southern state of Kerala
The photographer Sharad Haksar had some trouble from Coca-Cola after using their brandname in some of his art.
(http://www.indiaresource.org/news/2005/1077.html)
Be cautious when importing foodstuffs. Sometimes they're not produced to the high standards you'd like. I'm not sure how reliable this source is (seems a bit flame-baity) but it suggests that Indian versions of some soft drinks (not just Coca-Cola) are high in pesticides.
(http://www.indiaresource.org/campaigns/coke/2006/cokepoisoni...)
> In blatant disregard for lives in India, the Coca-Cola company continues to sell products in India with high levels of pesticides even today. Coca-Cola maintains that its products in India are completely safe, and that it has one global standard for all its products.
> The reality, however, is very different. On at least 10 occasions since January 2005, the US Food and Drug Administration has rejected the shipment of Coca-Cola products made in India coming into the US, on the grounds that they do not conform to US laws and that they are unsafe for the US public.
---
[1] It is frustrating when the BBC uses their news programmes and websites to promote their other programmes. "Face the Facts" is a reasonable investigative programme. Here's the website for it:
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007tmlp)
[+] [-] chrisacky|14 years ago|reply
To what extent are they allowed to keep this a secret? For example, I'm a vegetarian, so presumably they would have to declare if this secret ingredient contains animal products? (I'm sure it doesn't, it's just an example to portray the point).
And I'm guessing one of the people who knows the secret ingredient is Moe Syzlak?
[+] [-] angstrom|14 years ago|reply
It's possible only 2 people know it since 3 can't keep a secret. More likely anyone that knows it has signed NDAs on top of which they each know two versions of the same recipe with an indistinguishable flavoring difference due to a minor quantity differences. Either recipe were to get out it's obvious who leaked because the master copy is in the vault. The exact quantities are like a watermark that gives away the leaker. At any rate, if you have golden handcuffs you don't leak due to self preservation anyhow.
[+] [-] y0ghur7_xxx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|14 years ago|reply
The Rabbi who provides the Kosher certification for Coke also knows what the ingredients are. See:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Kasherin...
[+] [-] cynix|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nknight|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrian201|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nazar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eru|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoodq19|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donky_cong|14 years ago|reply
The company sells enough concentrate to produce millions of litters world-wide yearly.
Surely there are hundreds of trucks entering and leaving the facility, and by now the ingredients and their dosages are quite know.
[+] [-] kijin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistercow|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jach|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cinquemb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Terretta|14 years ago|reply
"Bonus fact: Coca-Cola’s recipe contains a heavily guarded mystery flavoring, known as the “7X flavor.” In early 2011, This American Life broadcast an episode[1] discussing a potential early recipe for the drink, but almost certainly not the one in use today. Coke denied[2] that the program had discovered the true formula. In that episode, Mark Pendergrast, author of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, an unauthorized history of the company (and beverage), told This American Life[3] that “only two people know how to mix the 7x flavoring ingredient” and that “[t]hose two people never travel on the same plane in case it crashes; it’s this carefully passed-on secret ritual and the formula is kept in a bank vault.”"
1. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/427/o...
2. http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/02/16/bubbly-buzz-coca-cola-sa...
3. http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/02/15/is-this-the-real-thing-c...
[+] [-] GreekOphion|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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