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Coca Cola's secret recipe revealed?
- ffffruit 16y agoWouldn'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.
- markszcz 16y agoReminds me of OpenCola http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink) Am I the only one or does anyone else hate the unnecessary popup ad on time.com?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- philk 16y agoInteresting 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.
- antidaily 16y agoYeah but have you noticed how generic brand cola doesn't taste nearly as good?
- axod 16y agoPepsi actually beats Coke in most taste tests. edit: I know, Pepsi isn't a "generic brand cola", just saying, Coke isn't usually rated the best.
- barrkel 16y agoAnd this is usually explained by Pepsi being sweeter, so it seems to be more pleasant for the first few sips.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bryanlarsen 16y agoOr more completely: because Pepsi is sweeter, a small quantity of Pepsi tastes better. However, if you asked people to rate based on an entire can of cola, your results would change. Dunno about that, I'm a Pepsi man, because the first place I worked was a gas station that only stocked Pepsi, so it was the first caffeinated beverage I drank in quantity.
- axod 16y agoI've heard this explanation before, but haven't seen any data from taste tests that include consuming a whole can. It's an interesting explanation, but doesn't seem backed up by data :/ All very well for Coke to say "If you did this, your results would change"... Where's the data? I'm also firmly Pepsi, just prefer sugar.
- cosmicray 16y agoInteresting premise ... Many years ago, back when I was working my way thru high school, my father was a shop manager at a manufacturing plant. One of the perks he had, was deciding what went in the drink cooler. He swore (all day and half the night) that the small bottles of Coke (8 oz or 6 oz) had a better flavor than the larger bottles of Coke did (which were either 12 oz or 16 oz). So, he made sure that there were always 2 rows stocked with the small bottles. This is from the days when all the bottles were returnable.
- electromagnetic 16y agoThis is rather interesting. Growing up in the UK the only place I could ever find Pepsi was at a KFC. McDonalds and most restaurants all have Coke. My first drink of Pepsi was at my friends' house whose father only ever got fast food from Burger King (which was impossible to find in my area of the UK because they use lower quality beef) so drank Pepsi. As an adult I've found the only relevant things for colas. Coke goes great with white rums and Pepsi goes great with spice rums. Beyond that I'll drink either whenever.
- eli 16y agoIn terms of what it costs to produce, Coke may be the best value for your dollar. But there are definitely superior colas out there if you're willing to spend slightly more. They don't have Coke's distribution or brand and they don't "taste like childhood" though.
- tertius 16y agoWhere?! I want some please!
- jeremymcanally 16y agoBoylan Cane Cola. It's available more widely than a lot of the other really good sodas.
- dagw 16y agoI really like a lot of Boylan's products, but not their cola. On an intellectual level I can reason that it tastes very good, but it just doesn't taste like what I'm looking for when I'm in the mood for a cola.
- beefman 16y agoThe very best I have tasted is Fentimans http://www.drinkfentimans.com http://www.drinkfentimans.com Try it! And report back with your opine.
- unwind 16y agoI would recommend Ubuntu Cola (http://www.ubuntu-trading.com/our-fairtrade-cola http://www.ubuntu-trading.com/our-fairtrade-cola) if it's available. It's all over the place in little Sweden, and quite tasty as well as being Fairtrade which is nice. Plus, the name is somewhat amusing if you also run Ubuntu Linux on your computers. :)
- akashs 16y agoWell, 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.
- eftpotrm 16y agoWhich was significantly a marketing issue - even the person running the anti-New Coke campaign preferred the new recipe in blind taste tests. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke Gay Mullins, a Seattle retiree looking to start a public relations firm with $120,000 of borrowed money, formed the organization Old Cola Drinkers of America on May 28 to lobby Coca-Cola to either reintroduce the old formula or sell it to someone else. [....] In two informal blind taste tests, Mullins either failed to distinguish New Coke from old or expressed a preference for New Coke.
- akashs 16y agoErr, sort of. The taste tests were flawed (and also the reason Pepsi repeatedly won blind taste tests over Coke around then as well). New Coke was designed to be more Pepsi-like in that it was sweeter. In smaller quantities, people readily preferred the sweeter of the two drinks, whether it was New Coke vs Coke Classic or it was Pepsi vs Coke Classic. But what the taste tests overlooked was that people preferred Coke Classic to either New Coke or Pepsi in larger quantities (e.g. a 12oz can).
- eftpotrm 16y agoWithout knowing the exact design of the test it's very difficult to be certain, but also from the linked Wikipedia article: Goizueta publicly voiced a complaint many company executives had been making in private as they shared letters the company had received thanking them for the change in formula, that bashing it had become "chic" and that, as had happened in the focus groups, peer pressure was keeping those who liked it from speaking up in its favor as vociferously as its critics were against it. Donald Keough, the company's president and chief operating officer, reported overhearing this exchange at his country club outside Atlanta: "Have you tried it?" "Yes." "Did you like it?" "Yes, but I'll be damned if I'll let Coca-Cola know that." ... Gladwell reports that other market researchers have criticized Coke for not realizing that much of its success as a brand came from what they call sensation transference, a phenomenon first described by marketer Louis Cheskin in the late 1940s: tasters unconsciously add their reactions to the drink's packaging into their assessment of the taste. For example, one of the researchers told Gladwell that his firm's research had found 7-Up drinkers offered a sample from a bottle with a distinctly more yellowish label believe the flavor to be more lemony, although it wasn't. ... Coke considered but rejected gradually changing the drink's flavor incrementally, without announcing that they were doing so. Executives feared that the public would notice and exaggerate slight differences in taste. In 1998, Joel Dubow, a professor of food marketing at St. Joseph's University, tested this "flavor balance hypothesis" and argued that it was not true. He and fellow researcher Nancy Childs tested mixtures of classic Coke and Coca-Cola II and found that the gradual changes of taste were not noticed by a significant number of tasters. Coke, he said, would have succeeded had it chosen this strategy. I'm not at all convinced the primary issue with New Coke was taste-based, from the available information.
- alizaki 16y agoCoke 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.
- tptacek 16y agoYour first sentence is clearly and obviously true, but that doesn't make the story any less newsworthy.
- ROFISH 16y agoThe 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.)
- wisty 16y agoAnd you can bet that the guy driving in tankers from a orange-oil factory to the coco-cola HQ would have an inkling as to what one of the ingredients is.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- burgerbrain 16y agoAh good point. Maybe they just pick people like you for truckers. :P "driving a truck from the orange oil plant? must be sugar!"
- kenjackson 16y agoCoke 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.
- tptacek 16y agoI 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 16y agoI 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.
- egypturnash 16y agoYeah. Modern Coke doesn't taste like my soft-focus sunlit memories of being six and having a big glass bottle of the stuff while wandering around the cavernous warehouse of the Contemporary Arts Center, but now that I've switched to small-bottler colas that're actually made with cane sugar, I get that taste-triggered Proustian nostalgia flashback on a pretty regular basis.
- adestefan 16y agoI 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.
- markszcz 16y agoI 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-obtains-its-coca.html http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/01/business/how-coca-cola-obt...
- ComputerGuru 16y agoI'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.
- jobrahms 16y agoThe 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.
- jonknee 16y agoIt also contains Coca extract... This obviously isn't the modern day recipe.
- eli 16y agoActually it is. Just decocainized.
- sammcd 16y agoBut it is in the modern day recipe: "To this day, Coca-Cola uses as an ingredient a cocaine-free coca leaf extract prepared at a Stepan Company plant in Maywood, New Jersey." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#Coca_.E2.80.94_cocaine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#Coca_.E2.80.94_cocain...
- joezydeco 16y agoThat 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.
- Splines 16y agoIf you just want the cane-sugar coke, I've seen Costco sell it (imported from Mexico, IIRC).
- troymc 16y agoI'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 16y agoSeems like this would be about as informative as looking at the assembly code for Firefox.
- burgerbrain 16y agoAnd if the browser industry were as big as the beverage industry, and if Firefox had the kind of advantage Coke has, I am sure people would be doing it.
- georgemcbay 16y agoYou forgot at least one "and": ...and if Firefox weren't open source. Why look at disassembled asm when you can download the C/C++ code?
- powrtoch 16y agoCome to think of it, I probably could have chosen a better example, as Firefox is open source...
- icefox 16y agoGiven the right amount of time looking at the assembly of firefox isn't an impossible way to find out what it is doing. A good counter example is the assembly of old nes games. I have read through some of them and you can even find nice commented versions of the main games source like mario, mario3, super mario etc. Reading the source is really eye opening. Some features in the game are very hard coded and fundamental to the code base changing it would be extremely hard. Other times you find fantastically elegant code. If anyone is interested in a treat go read the level loading asm for smb1.
- antihero 16y agoThe 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 16y agoThat'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.
- justincormack 16y agoThis 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.
- marknutter 16y agoI'm a little upset it's not alien slug feces.
- camiller 16y agoMmmmm... Slurm
- hornokplease 16y agoRelated: This American Life's server crashed today under the load driven by the story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222841 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222841
- deadmansshoes 16y agoWe need some more secret sauce. Put this mayonnaise in the sun!
- tankenmate 16y agoI always thought that cola had lavender as one of its ingredients..
- StrawberryFrog 16y agoWhy would you want to go digging through old documents for the recipe when you could use a chromatograph?
- ck2 16y agoA 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-from-blackout-in-a-can-to-ethanol/ 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?
- MikeCapone 16y ago"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
- mahrain 16y agoPick 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.