'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 th

'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.