
What Coke Contains - rchaudhary
https://medium.com/the-ingredients-2/221d449929ef
======
jscheel
Ok, bit of a bragging moment here: my grandpa, with two other gentlemen,
created the process for machining seamless cans that is described here. Before
them, cans had a lead seam in them. They discovered that you could draw down
the aluminum and stretch it to form cans in one piece. He also invented the
process for creating the bottom of soda cans, and his friend invented the
modern tab on the top of soda cans.

~~~
DigitalSea
Wow that's awesome. We live in a society where one person takes credit for
something and in this case a Coke can is comprised of many inventions as are
many things. You never hear about the guy who helped shape the process of
creating the bottom of soda cans or the tab on them. I wonder who invented
that piece of plastic that holds store bought bread together?

~~~
a_p
Loaves of bread were sold unsliced until 1928, when a guy named Otto Rohwedder
figured out how to slice bread without crushing it. Rohwedder then wrapped the
bread and inserted U-shaped pins on both sides of the loaf to make it look
similar to an unsliced loaf. Sliced bread became a hit because you no longer
had to worry about cutting pieces of similar thickness when you made a
sandwich.

That's where the expression "the best thing since sliced bread" comes from.
Obviously, people had been slicing loaves of bread for ages, but pre-sliced
bread really is a relatively recent business innovation. The NYT magazine had
a page about this in this week's issue.[1] Also, here is a Google ngram of the
phrase "since sliced bread". You can see that the saying started in the 1950s.
[2]

[1][http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/magazine/who-made-that-
sli...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/magazine/who-made-that-sliced-
bread.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0)

[2][http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=since+sliced+br...](http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=since+sliced+bread&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=)

~~~
zizee
I can not remember where read it, but if I recall correctly, sliced bread did
not catch on until the patent on the bread slicing machine expired.

------
frozenport
_I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls
and adults who can read and write._
<http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html>

~~~
LaGrange
I find it unfortunate that an otherwise interesting story is used to convey
some silly neo-liberal ideas. Try that getting-stuff-over-the-ocean-cheaply
trick without harbors.

~~~
jacques_chester
OK, I'll bite: which are the silly neoliberal ideas?

~~~
LaGrange
"Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand."

/curtains

~~~
jacques_chester
Are you saying that people don't act according to their own satisfaction
(monetary, emotional, romantic etc)? That human activity is basically Gaussian
noise?

~~~
vacri
That's a strawman - disagreeing with the concept of the Invisible Hand (or
perhaps rather, disagreeing with the scale some attribute it) is not the same
as saying humans are RNGs.

~~~
jacques_chester
Yes, it's a leading question.

From the other side of the debate I'd attack the concept of subjective value.

Why do people value this? We don't know. They just do.

How do you know they value it? Because of their actions.

Why do they take those actions? Because of their valuations.

But it's also difficult to argue the counter-case. Outside of corner cases
such as depression, psychotic episodes etc, if people aren't acting to
diminish discomfort or increase their perceived happiness, then what _is_
motivating them?

~~~
vacri
The problem with this argument is it's too simplistic. When you respond with
"people will sometimes do things against their best interests out of a sense
of duty", the counter is to reduce the human to a stimulus-response box and
say "aha! but they must be doing _that_ because it benefits some psychological
issue, so it _is_ increasing their happiness"

The issue comes when that extremely mangled definition of happiness isn't then
injected into economic discourse - it becomes a matter of dusting off the
hands and saying "well, we proved that people do what's required to be happy"
and go back to the simpler definition.

In any case, reducing everyone to a stimulus-response box and stating that on
balance, it must be beneficial to choose action X for the organism turns the
definition of 'happiness' into something worthless and actually pretty banal.

Edit: I usually see this argument in the sense of 'maximising profit', but
occasionally as 'happiness' or other beneficial emotion.

~~~
jacques_chester
I agree with the shifting sands of the "self interest" view.

Economists, though, don't fuss as much about motives because they're not
observable. I mean you can build a reasonably explanatory model by simply
assuming people are greedy hyperrationalists. But nobody really does that
because it's just too simplistic.

If I had a point, I guess it's that economics thinking is much more textured
and subtle than people give it credit for. "Neoliberal" is a label that was
invented by critics and so its meaning is basically "whichever strawman fits
right now".

If we're naming names amongst the arch-neoliberals, I think these days I
prefer Hayek to almost anyone else. I think he really spent time in the stew
of ideas and didn't retreat from the revealed complexity of the world into
equations.

------
aneth4
The most interesting part of the story lies here:

"coca-leaf which comes from South America and is processed in a unique US
government authorized factory in New Jersey to remove its addictive stimulant
cocaine"

Consider the implications of one of the largest American companies being
singularly authorized to buy and import hundreds of tons of coca leaf, which
is banned in nearly every country and produced primarily by illegal drug
manufacturers. Does anyone believe there's no funny business going on here?

(For the record, I think coca and cocaine should be legal.)

[http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/apr/19/20040419-093...](http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/apr/19/20040419-093635-4754r/)

~~~
rm999
Here's an article on that topic and some excerpts I thought were interesting
[http://www.uic.edu/classes/osci/osci590/9_3%20The%20Legal%20...](http://www.uic.edu/classes/osci/osci590/9_3%20The%20Legal%20Importation%20of%20Coca%20Leaf.htm)

>The Stepan Company (a $400 million American Stock Exchange company) of
Maywood, New Jersey imports 175,000 KG of coca leaves into the United States
each year. The leaves come from some of the same farms that supply the
Columbian drug cartels.

>Flavor scientists say that the mysterious essence has no significant taste of
its own , but acts as an 'enhancer' PepsiCo Inc. does not use the coca leaf.
Flavor scientist Nicholas Feurstein thinks that the average guzzler might well
notice the difference if Coke stopped using it.

>The leaf is ground up, mixed with sawdust, soaked in bicarbonate of soda,
percolated with toluene, steam blasted, mixed with powdered Kola nuts, and
then pasteurized. The Coke-Cola company, forever fearful of the DEA and the
drug lords, is a stickler on security and quality. Drug lords have a less
formal way to extract cocaine: they use kerosene as a solvent; the drug
leaches out like tea from a tea bag. Cocaine is then recovered by evaporation.

~~~
davidtanner
From what I recall, a non polar solvent such as kerosene is used in the crude
extraction of cocaine. However, it's very very unlikely that "cocaine is then
recovered by evaporation" since kerosene is obtained by the fractional
distillation of crude oil starting at 150C. Even if it were possible to
evaporate off the kerosene to obtain freebase cocaine it would be amazingly
dangerous.

The actual cocaine refining process, I believe, is a fairly typical polar/non-
polar acid/base extraction.

------
danem
A more famous, and perhaps more interesting version of this observation can be
found here: <http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html>

------
jechen
Curious as to why there's no mention of the secret formula, since the author
is wrong about kola nut being an ingredient of the syrup:
<http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/pr2001447> (from the Coca-Cola wiki
page), which interestingly is a component in many purported recipes.

It's also interesting to see a picture of a glass bottle coke when the
American product rarely exists in such form. I've sworn off the HFCS version
after discovering the Mexican recipe with cane sugar - it tastes so much
better and comes in a glass bottle. When I was in Tijuana for a Startup
Weekend, that's all they served.

~~~
Wonderdonkey
This time of year you can buy "Passover Coke." It's made with cane sugar. It
has no corn syrup in it whatsoever, while Mexican Coke actually has a ≈70/30
cane/corn mix. You can tell it apart from regular Coke by its yellow cap
printed with a circle U (kosher symbol).

It's much cheaper than Mexican Coke (same price as regular 2 liter Coke),
although it doesn't come in a glass bottle. And it's delicious! I actually
stock up every year since I found out about this.

~~~
lobster_johnson
You should consider making your own cola. It's easy, and very rewarding.
Recipe mentioned in my other comment [1].

Incidentally, there are some very good "alternative" colas. My favourite is
Fentimans' Curiosity Cola [2], which NY Times once described as "the world's
best cola", and which is made with a small amount of fermented ginger
(fermented juices is their thing). I also really like Boylan's Cane Cola [3].

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5311790>

[2] <http://www.fentimans.com/>

[3] [http://www.boylanbottling.com/products/cane-sugar-
sodas/boyl...](http://www.boylanbottling.com/products/cane-sugar-sodas/boylan-
cane-sugar-cola/)

~~~
Wonderdonkey
Fentimans' sounds awesome. I've had a lot of other cane sodas like Boylan's.
My kids and I used to raid Bevmo's soda aisle once a week to try new things.
That gets expensive though. Passover Coke is nice and cheap by comparison. I
never thought about making my own. Maybe I'll give it a try.

------
bdc
An interesting derivative of "I, Pencil":

<http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html>

------
venus
> The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero

While I understand what the author is trying to say, I don't think that is
true at all. I'm pretty sure that if they had a good reason, any number of
advanced economies could get it together enough to produce the cans
themselves. Seems like the main hard part is the aluminium.

While I'm nit-picking, I believe natural cryolite has not been used in
aluminium processing for decades.

Thought-provoking article, though; I typed this with a can of Diet Coke on my
desk.

~~~
nivloc
It's the same reason natural cryolite isn't used - it's not economically
viable. Lots of countries grow all the agricultural products. Aluminum isn't
hard, just potentially more expensive.

> While I'm nit-picking...

Me too, Pinjarra is where the _refinery_ for the largest producing bauxite
mine is. And the refinery operates today because of cheap coal in Australia.

As is the case with many industrial minerals, it's often _far_ cheaper to ship
raw ore or concentrates to smelters built where electricity is cheap. Aluminum
is no exception, and electricity cost is the reason there is a refinery in
Iceland, despite being far from any bauxite mines.

The story really isn't that no country _can't_ make a can of Coke, but _why
they don't_. It's a fascinating story, unfortunately mostly told through
feasibility spreadsheets.

I'm in the industry and it's not hard to think of all the steps ranging
hundreds of millions of years to put an apple on my desk (there's volcanoes
and inland seas! Dinosaurs if you stretch your mind!). This is a good summary.
If he got any deeper, it'd be a book.

~~~
vacri
_Lots of countries grow all the agricultural products_

Who grows cinnamon, vanilla, coca, and kola? How many countries grow all four,
because I doubt it's "lots". Do they also have some form of sugar and
aluminium industries? (or steel/tin industries for different kinds of cans, or
glass industry for bottles (with something for caps)?)

Besides, saying "oh, but countries could, they just don't" is having your cake
and eating it too - the fact that countries _don't_ because it's massively
uneconomical means that yes, it does take multiple countries to produce a can.

It's a bit like saying "it takes a superpower to land men on the moon". Oh,
sure, you could say "no it doesn't - throw enough private enterprise together
and get someone there", but the point remains, no-one will - it still takes a
superpower to land men on the moon.

------
chimpinee
An enormous and sophisticated 'tool chain'. Surely it could never be
implemented in a one-day-to-be-invented universal fabricator? One is reminded
of those 19th C ppl who thought recorded music was impossible since any player
would have to contain miniature versions of all the orchestral instruments (or
things that resembled them: "humanity's choir") together with a horrendously
large paper roll punched full of holes

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
If you have a large enough supply of electrons, protons and neutrons, and you
can combine them at will, you can make anything.

~~~
lifeformed
Anything except for quarks.

~~~
jacquesm
If you bang some of the electrons hard enough into some of the neutrons or
protons you'll even get quarks.

~~~
ars
No you won't.

You need to bang protons or neutron together. Electrons don't participate in
color force and can't make quarks.

~~~
jacquesm
Hehe, trust me for getting it wrong, you are absolutely right.

------
fernly
I think Mr. Ashton is trying to illustrate Sagan's dictum, "If you wish to
make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." Except it's
coke, and he doesn't go past bauxite.

------
lostlogin
>>The top of the can is then added. This is carefully engineered: it is made
from aluminum, but it has to be thicker and stronger to withstand the pressure
of the carbon dioxide gas.<<

Eh? The pressure is greater at the top of the can?

~~~
shabble
It may also be a result of greater stiffness required for the captive pop-tab
opener to work properly.

There's an interesting Slate article[1] about the complexity of what appears
to be a such a simple feature; in order to achieve the force necessary to
rupture the can opening, the tab pivot transitions between a first and second
class lever. There's a good video somewhere showing the principles, but I
can't seem to find it.

Returning to the 'pressure' argument, recall that most drinks cans have a
domed bottom which provides comparatively greater strength than the flatter
top.

[1]
[http://www.slate.com/articles/life/design/2012/09/can_tabs_h...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/design/2012/09/can_tabs_how_aluminum_pop_tabs_were_redesigned_to_make_drinking_soda_safer_and_the_world_a_cleaner_place_.single.html)

~~~
izakage
Here's a link to the mentioned video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekv0kprA3AY>

------
meaty
This instantly reminded me of:

<http://www.gburnett.unisonplus.net/Perma/indexp2.htm>

(The Industrial Cup Of Tea)

------
benmaraschino
For those who might be interested, here's a fantastic Scientific American
(back when it was still good) article about the aluminum can and how it's
made: <http://www.chymist.com/Aluminum%20can.pdf>

------
webwielder
See also: <http://thetoasterproject.org>

------
erickhill
It's incredible to me that an essay as detailed as this one had not one single
citation. Regardless, it was a fascinating read.

------
triplesec
This sounds something like an astroturf for a brown chemical drink which sure
as eggs is eggs will rot your teeth and kill you sooner than if you drink
clean water (or moderate amounts of wine for that matter). We can make the
globalisation and connectedness point a lot more clearly and ideologically
neutrally without promoting useless Lowest Common Denominator products that
merely waste our resources and do not add to the total sum of human happiness.

~~~
goostavos
>This sounds something like an astroturf for a brown chemical drink which sure
as eggs is eggs will rot your teeth and kill you sooner than if you drink
clean water (or moderate amounts of wine for that matter).

...Did you just make that up on the spot?

>We can make the globalisation and connectedness point a lot more clearly and
ideologically neutrally without promoting useless Lowest Common Denominator
products that merely waste our resources and do not add to the total sum of
human happiness.

Oh, good grief, I responded to your _exact_ type of comment by another person
further down, but I'll repeat the summary here: _Your comment makes no sense._

I don't know if you're just the type of guy that needs to cut down everything
to justify your ego, or maybe this is just a form of the engineer humble brag,
but honestly, "Lowest Common Denominator products that merely waste our
resources and do not add to the total sum of human happiness." Really? You
going to stand by that? Did you even read the article?

I'd say the fact that it requires all of the distribution and production means
describes in the article to keep up the demand of its product a tick in the
"Brings Happiness" column. I myself very much enjoy having a Cherry Coke Zero
when anytime I visit the theater. Have I, along with the rest of the world,
been deluding myself? I didn't actually enjoy that product, and got no
happiness or enjoyment out of its consumption? Who knew!

Further human happiness is a strange thing to use as a measuring stick for a
product's "worth." What is the 'level' of human happiness that a product must
bring before it is of value in your book? Obviously, being that coca-cola
product represent 3% of all beverages consumed around the world (I looked it
up), we need something that, what, hits that 4% mark before we can acknowledge
that it actually does deliver some marginal level of happiness to the
population?

What is your opinion on restaurants? Those seem to provide the same type of
happiness as a coke. Maybe we should tell all those people to go out and do
something worthwhile that gives _actual_ happiness. Whatever that fuck that
actually means.

~~~
triplesec
I read the whole thing. Yes, wow, impressive supply chain. But then the supply
chain for something useful like an aircraft, or mechanical digger would be a
lot more useful.

I'm a very positive person... for things which improve the su of human
happiness and creativity, in the spirit of the Bay Area, rather than just
selling sugar for the sake of finance.

wrt your ad homines, I'd examine the psychological projection of your own ego
onto ohters: why get personal when this is jsut an interesting deate about
values, economics, production and globalisation? Have a lovely day!

~~~
goostavos
>But then the supply chain for something useful like an aircraft, or
mechanical digger would be a lot more useful.

By what metric? Please, do explain. What does it mean to be "useful." Is a
chef useful? Is an artist useful? Comments like yours get under my skin
because they seem purposefully vague, which allows plenty of room for high
browing, and faux elitism.

>rather than just selling sugar for the sake of finance.

Ok, so what is your cut off? Should all food manufacturers switch to aerospace
engineering so they can finally contribute something useful? Bakeries? We
should probably laud them as well. After all, they are, pretty much by
definition, sugar in return for profit. Art is probably out too, I suppose.
The film industry, despite is fantastically complex tool chain, at the end of
the day, isn't really "useful." It contributes a kind of arbitrary happiness.
Feel free to let me know if I'm off base, or if you feel as though I'm
strawmanning. It's just that "sum happiness" and "useful" are so vague and
poorly defined that I have no idea what you mean.

>jsut an interesting deate about values, economics, production and
globalisation?

Dismissing something without reason is not a debate. That is the issue I took
with your comment. "sum happiness" means nothing at all.

------
RexRollman
I didn't realize that they were adding caffeine; I was under the impression it
was a natural by-product of the ingredients.

~~~
beachstartup
cocaine is the natural by-product. caffeine was the replacement after cocaine
was deemed illegal.

------
s0rce
I believe most of the cryolite used now is synthetic
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hexafluoroaluminate>).

------
k33
eh, I just don't feel like the writer understands or cares to explain how that
whole process is actually detrimental to the world despite the fact that it
"unites" it. Coke is just addictive sugar water that does nothing for anyone.
When has coke given you something other than diabetes?

Kevin Ashton fails at pointing out the impact of this collaboration. Couldn't
all of these talented people that made such a sophisticated product put their
energy towards something.. I dunno, useful?

~~~
6cxs2hd6
> Coke is just addictive sugar water

It would be somewhat healthier if it actually contained sugar (as opposed to
high fructose corn syrup).

~~~
mbaird
In the UK it still uses sugar, and imho tastes a whole lot better than the
HFCS version.

~~~
yareally
Most countries still do, except the US, where we have corn subsidies and sugar
tariffs to artificially lower the price of corn and artificially raise the
price of sugar (to protect a few growers in the south US).

The other year when sugar prices were near equal to corn, Pepsi and Dr. Pepper
distributed soda with sugar only throughout much of the United States. I
haven't followed the prices of sugar since, but I would gather the price went
back up either naturally or through congressional means.

~~~
maxerickson
The commodity price of sugar is ~1.5 cents per can of soda, so I think they
could get away with it whenever they wanted (meaning that they would have
canceled the products because they weren't making enough volume on them).

Now I looked it up, Pepsi markets "throwback" brands which use sugar.

------
dimitar
This reminds a lot of Milton Friedman's pencil story
(<http://youtu.be/R5Gppi-O3a8?t=15s>)

------
blaze33
And what Coke no longer contains: alcohol, cocaine. Also without sugar and
caffeine if you want, sometimes I wonder what's the point of drinking it.

I remember reading it would be more interesting to use steel cans because it's
easier to catch them using magnets. Are we now able to sort and recycle
aluminum cans better ?

------
Tloewald
Reminds me of a passage from Richard Powers's novel "Gain" where the process
by which a disposable camera is manufactured, packaged, distributed, ad sold
serves to explain everything that is at once miraculous and broken about our
world.

------
Mamady
First it was an interesting article, but the last paragraph made it an amazing
article.

------
kolev
Well, this article gives yet another reason to stay away from sodas.

------
likethateh
> on the Murray River in Western Australia called Pinjarra

always jarring to read something you know to be so obviously false so early in
a piece. *waves to fellow Sandgropers

~~~
6ren
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing [http://www.smh.com.au/news/Western-
Australia/Pinjarra/2005/0...](http://www.smh.com.au/news/Western-
Australia/Pinjarra/2005/02/17/1108500208647.html)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_River_%28Western_Austral...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_River_%28Western_Australia%29)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinjarra,_Western_Australia>

~~~
jacques_chester
It's jarring because there's a much more famous Murray river "over east".

~~~
6ren
I know, it borders my state. But the article specifies the one in Western
Australia. Seems OK; but maybe I'm just getting too accustomed to the
unhelpfully concise style of mathematics papers.

It was surprising to me too, but concluding it to be "so obviously false"
seems unwarranted, especially online - where it's so easy to check. Dismissing
surprises as incorrect narrows the world into one's model of the world. And to
me, the unknown is more interesting than the known.

------
Uncompetative
"The second ingredient, caramel coloring, gives the drink its distinctive dark
brown color. There are four types of caramel coloring — Coca Cola uses type
E150d, which is made by heating sugars with sulfite and ammonia to create
bitter brown liquid. The syrup’s other principal ingredient is phosphoric
acid, which adds acidity and is made by diluting burnt phosphorus (made by
heating phosphate rock in an arc-furnace) and processing it to remove
arsenic."

Hmmm... arsenic

I'd rather there were no lethal poisons at any point in the production
process.

I'm never drinking another glass of Coca-Cola. I'm not touching PEPSI either.

~~~
iso-8859-1
There's _a lot_ of stuff you can't ingest, if you'd follow that criterion.

~~~
ars
Of all things for him to stop drinking....

But if you are worried about arsenic don't eat rice, and be careful of the
ground water (depending on where you live).

------
rdl
I'm curious if coca cola contains real vanilla extract vs. synthetic; seems
implausible for them to use the real plant product.

------
gnnr
Further reminds me that if you love something, even an everyday item,
researching it's origin can be rewarding.

------
Amanda_Panda
I love these kinds of threads, where software engineers pretend they are
experts in economics, etc.

------
mynameishere
By contrast, you can make wine from a single ingredient. And it's an awful lot
better than coke.

~~~
jonknee
The glass bottle, cork, label, etc do not grow on the vine.

~~~
contingencies
Nor do sterilized equipment, reliably dominant yeasts, clarification agents,
additional sugars and yeast nutrients often required to balance or complete
fermentation, or environments that maintain and/or remove suitable temperature
ranges for desirable yeasts.

------
pohl
An obvious omission: salt.

~~~
pixl97
Well, salt being common (now, not historically) is probably sourced close to
production to reduce its transportation costs. There is a large salt mine
within 35 miles of my house, and they are located all along the gulf coast in
salt domes, a by product of oil exploration.

~~~
pohl
You make a good point about it not fitting the international narrative, but
then water can be sourced anywhere and they mention the word twice.

------
largesse
I read it and then thought "Why Coke?" That's the story of every manufactured
product assembled from multi-sourced vendors. It's not news, and it's not
unique to Coke. If you think it is you'll probably have an orgasm when you
learn how pencils are made.

~~~
marknutter
Right, this same story gets re-hashed every few months on the popular news
sharing sites as a way to "blow people's minds" and there is never a shortage
of people who lap it up. It _is_ amazing how stuff is made, but not mind-
blowing.

~~~
ubercow13
Who said anyone is trying to blow anyone's minds? It's just an article which
has been posted which is interesting.

------
gunt69
a great example of capitalism. think about that the next time you have a knee
jerk reaction towards business.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Private enterprise != capitalism. And planned economies have done this kind of
thing, too.

~~~
jacques_chester
They have, but not as well as a rule.

Plus, not every country has every resource. Even the vast internal resources
of the USSR needed to be supplemented by goods and services purchased on the
open market (and vice-versa, the USSR got most of its hard currency by selling
oil).

