
Coca Cola's secret recipe revealed? - joetek
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/02/15/is-this-the-real-thing-coca-colas-secret-formula-discovered/
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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.

~~~
msg
Read Dan Ariely's chapter 1 in Predictably Irrational. It is about relativity
and the decoy effect. If you have a choice between A and B, then adding a
third choice that looks like a defective version of A (the decoy) tends to
nudge people to pick A over B.

As he explains it, choosing between two options in a vacuum is hard. You have
to list pros and cons and weigh them carefully. We prefer to create yardsticks
and say "better" and "worse". When you add the defective option you create a
no-brainer yardstick in the mind of the chooser.

Doesn't this sound suspiciously like New Coke? I don't believe that the
marketers didn't know this stuff, or that they were caught by surprise by what
played out next.

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jessriedel
I dunno. I was under the impression that New Coke was an unmitigated disaster.
Coca-Cola Classic (then just "Coca-Cola") was already the dominant soda when
it was introduced, and I don't think they picked up any market share in the
months/years after the introduction of New Coke. But they did spend a _ton_ of
advertising money on the new soda which failed spectacularly.

~~~
InclinedPlane
New Coke was fantastic for Coca-Cola. Coke was on the decline while Pepsi was
on the rise. New Coke was an attempt to reinvigorate the brand and get people
drinking more Coke again. It succeeded accidentally, as people decided they
liked Coke as it had been, leading to a resurgence of sales.

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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.

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egypturnash
Yeah. 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.

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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.

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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.)

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wisty
And 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.

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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?

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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

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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.

~~~
burgerbrain
And 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.

~~~
powrtoch
Come to think of it, I probably could have chosen a better example, as Firefox
is open source...

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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.

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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.

~~~
Splines
If you just want the cane-sugar coke, I've seen Costco sell it (imported from
Mexico, IIRC).

~~~
joezydeco
I've tried it too. _Way_ too sweet.

Local bottlers will tweak the syrup/water ratio for the local tastes. I've
been told it's sweeter in the south than the north. The Mexican mix is
insanely heavy on the syrup.

I've tried Coke syrup straight. It'll make the muscles in your jaw convulse
from the insane sugar hit.

~~~
MartinCron
_I've tried it too. Way too sweet._

The key, for me, anyway, to Mexican Coke is to keep it at room temperature and
serve it over ice. It's always cold enough, and the slight dilution from the
melting ice makes it perfect.

Also, the Mexican mix isn't heavy on the syrup, it's heavy on _cane sugar_.

~~~
joezydeco
I'd like to believe that Coke doesn't mess around with the ratio of sweetener
_inside_ the syrup.

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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...](http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/01/business/how-coca-cola-obtains-its-
coca.html)

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

~~~
markszcz
+1 Thanks man, definetly will. =)

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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...](http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/01/07/four-lokos-silver-lining-from-
blackout-in-a-can-to-ethanol/)

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?

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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camiller
Mmmmm... Slurm

