12 ms·

I just read the copyright thread, and someone mentioned how the Coca-Cola recipe is still secret, not copyrighted or trademarked. I kept thinking that with enou

by 205guy 14y ago

I just read the copyright thread, and someone mentioned how the Coca-Cola recipe is still secret, not copyrighted or trademarked. I kept thinking that with enough computational power, someone could eventually reverse engineer it from some mass spectrometer analysis (or maybe some molecular technique). But you'd need a good DB of organic molecules and their origin to start with.

ghayes 14y ago
I'd be interested in just knowing the techniques used to go about this rather than the answer itself. Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/683/ http://xkcd.com/683/
- chm 14y ago
  If you're genuinely interested, here are some nice analytical chemistry books: Quantitative Chemical Analysis (Daniel C. Harris) Principles of Instrumental Analysis (Skoog, Holler, Nieman) The following one, which you should read first because it's free, is also good: http://www.asdlib.org/onlineArticles/ecourseware/Analytical%20Chemistry%202.0/Welcome.html http://www.asdlib.org/onlineArticles/ecourseware/Analytical%... Just ask questions if you're interested.
A1kmm 14y ago
'Secret recipes' for major commercial food and beverage products are really a marketing myth - dominant brands want the public think their product is so good that all their competitors would copy it, except they don't know the recipe. The reality is that a broad range of techniques (e.g. GC-MS) could reliably identify the chemical composition of products if competitors really wanted to know, and creating a recipe from the chemical composition isn't that hard (the chemical composition of many flavouring herbs and spices used commercially are widely available), and assuming no chemical transformations during processing, solving for the levels of ingredients from the levels of plants is simple linear algebra (solve Transpose(A)Y=Tranpose(A)AX for X, Y is a column vector giving the concentrations of the dominant species, A is a matrix giving the concentrations of each compound in each plant, and X is the unknown column vector giving the amount of each plant to use). Assuming thousands of species and ingredient possibilities, this could realistically be solved in less than a second on my home computer - no need for the supercomputer. The real reason that big companies like Pepsi don't make an exact copy of Coca-Cola is not that they don't know what is in Coca-Cola, it is that it would be bad business - it is far better to make a product with its own distinctive taste for customers to like that is nevertheless close enough to be a substitute.
rogerbinns 14y ago
The recipe is published at the back of the book For God, Country and Coca-Cola. Now that you have the recipe, what could you actually do with it? Who would actually sell the product? How would you market it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula Once you have your recipe you can go to a company like Cott who will manufacture it for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cott http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cott and then you have the problem of selling it. In many stores it is actually Coca Cola employees who deliver the product and put it up on the shelves. All the store does is ring the drinks up at the till. And the supplier often has to purchase the shelf space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee There are "open source" cola recipes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_cola http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_cola http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink)

by 205guy 14y ago

ghayes 14y ago

I'd be interested in just knowing the techniques used to go about this rather than the answer itself. Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/683/ http://xkcd.com/683/

chm 14y ago
If you're genuinely interested, here are some nice analytical chemistry books: Quantitative Chemical Analysis (Daniel C. Harris) Principles of Instrumental Analysis (Skoog, Holler, Nieman) The following one, which you should read first because it's free, is also good: http://www.asdlib.org/onlineArticles/ecourseware/Analytical%20Chemistry%202.0/Welcome.html http://www.asdlib.org/onlineArticles/ecourseware/Analytical%... Just ask questions if you're interested.

A1kmm 14y ago

'Secret recipes' for major commercial food and beverage products are really a marketing myth - dominant brands want the public think their product is so good that all their competitors would copy it, except they don't know the recipe. The reality is that a broad range of techniques (e.g. GC-MS) could reliably identify the chemical composition of products if competitors really wanted to know, and creating a recipe from the chemical composition isn't that hard (the chemical composition of many flavouring herbs and spices used commercially are widely available), and assuming no chemical transformations during processing, solving for the levels of ingredients from the levels of plants is simple linear algebra (solve Transpose(A)Y=Tranpose(A)AX for X, Y is a column vector giving the concentrations of the dominant species, A is a matrix giving the concentrations of each compound in each plant, and X is the unknown column vector giving the amount of each plant to use). Assuming thousands of species and ingredient possibilities, this could realistically be solved in less than a second on my home computer - no need for the supercomputer. The real reason that big companies like Pepsi don't make an exact copy of Coca-Cola is not that they don't know what is in Coca-Cola, it is that it would be bad business - it is far better to make a product with its own distinctive taste for customers to like that is nevertheless close enough to be a substitute.

rogerbinns 14y ago

The recipe is published at the back of the book For God, Country and Coca-Cola. Now that you have the recipe, what could you actually do with it? Who would actually sell the product? How would you market it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula Once you have your recipe you can go to a company like Cott who will manufacture it for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cott http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cott and then you have the problem of selling it. In many stores it is actually Coca Cola employees who deliver the product and put it up on the shelves. All the store does is ring the drinks up at the till. And the supplier often has to purchase the shelf space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee There are "open source" cola recipes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_cola http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_cola http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink)