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If only two executives know the secret recipe of Coca Cola at any one time, and it is so well guarded, then how do they manufacture Coca Cola in plants without giving away this secret to the workers?

Alexandru
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2 Answers2

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It's no secret; here it is! Complete with the cocaine that was removed from Coke's production in 1903:

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Picture and text from This American Life

The radio broadcast recording on the above link makes a compelling case that the picture at the top of the page is the original formula for Coke. Of course, it has changed over the years; it's not exactly the same thing now as it was way back when. In addition to removing the cocaine, they've also cut the caffeine, switched from sugar to high fructose corn syrup, and use phosphoric acid now instead of citric acid. The proportions of the 7X ingredients had to have changed over time, as the ingredients themselves have changed. Extracting oils is a very different process now than over 100 years ago.

The idea that the formula is ever-so-secret is a marketing gimmick. Sure, the actual formula is a trade secret, but the massive effort to keep the world's biggest secret thing is just a bunch of theater.

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Photo and caption from NY Daily News

The "down to the gram" specifics of the production recipe today are trade secrets, but no more so than just about every trademarked, brand-name food item sold today. No one person mixes and measures the whole batch (that's just practical, it's not even necessarily a security measure), so keeping the "super-secret-recipe" as it stands today from being published is no more difficult for Coke than it is for KFC. Nor are there highly-paid super-sleuths trying to steal the formula against whom Coke needs to take extraordinary measures.

EDIT 9/20/15 This American Life has added the following to their story:

Much of the press about our story takes at face value Coca-Cola's statements that we have not found the recipe for Coke, present or past. But when asked if the company has checked to see if this formula matches the original formula - which archivist Phil Mooney assured me they still have - company spokespeople always politely sidestep the question. So it seems entirely possible that no one at Coke has checked. If they'd checked to see if the formulas match, why not say so?

Phil Mooney even admitted something interesting about the recipe in our interview: "Could it be a precursor? Yeah, absolutely." He then went on to express, as his opinion, not as fact: "Is this the one that went to market? I don't think so."

They're just goofin.

Addendum

When I wrote this answer, I had no idea that it would get so "big" or that Skeptics.SE and Chemistry.SE had taken on the same issue. Had I known, I would have spent a little more time researching. I have since done quite a bit more research and am now even more strongly of the opinion that the secret formula of Coke is just an ordinary trade secret, and the hype is just hype for the sake of marketing.

Furthermore, the recipe for the 7X (that's even what Coke calls its "ever so super-secret" formula) in the old book pictured at the top of this answer is genuinely either the original formula or a precursor to it. At any rate, it's darn close.

If you're interested in learning more about the handwritten recipe in the book, I strongly encourage you to follow this link: This American Life and listen to the recording of the radio broadcast about the book, the formula, and the hype.

Early in the broadcast, they make a point I've been saying since I first got wind of this completely over-the-top marketing gimmick. One of the legends of "the secret" is that only two people know it, and they never fly on the same plane (like the President of the United States and the Vice President).

"The company has always said, and as far as I know, it's true, that at any given time only two people know how to mix the 7X flavoring ingredient," Mark Pendergrast, historian and author of For God, Country, and Coke told This American Life. "Those two people never travel on the same plane in case it crashes; it's this carefully passed-on secret ritual, and the formula is kept in a bank vault." Time Magazine

Think about that for a second. If the vault contains "the secret" known to only the two men, and the two men died in the same plane crash, wouldn't someone at the company be able to open the vault? If the two men know something beyond that (or somethings, one version of the legend held that each man only knew half the secret), why wouldn't they also put that information in the vault?

Furthermore, if you have a really big secret that you'll go to any lengths to keep, would you shout from every mountaintop, "I know something YOU don't! Nee ner nee ner nee ner!"?

So I say again, yes, it's a trade secret; it's just a regular trade secret. It's not the Manhattan Project. The hype is just hype; the fact that we're talking about it now emphasizes how effective the marketing is. Buying into the hype is just drinking the Kool-Aid.

Jolenealaska
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    A cynical person might say that this is a less of a goof, and more of a means to reinforce their brand by inflating its prestige. Presumably something must be special if it has a super-secret formula! An even more cynical person might point out that there *is* no single recipe, and that the formulation differs by country and market (e.g. "Mexican Coke"). The most cynical person ever is just waiting for them to bring back New Coke. – logophobe Aug 11 '14 at 14:16
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    Hm, could you have a look at http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8559/is-the-coca-cola-recipe-a-secret and see what the deal is? The skeptics seem to think that it is a secret, not just for show. – Cascabel Aug 11 '14 at 19:40
  • Which part of the ingredient list is the cocaine in? – Kyle Strand Aug 11 '14 at 19:52
  • @KyleStrand That's the "extract of coca", which apparently they still use, but somehow with the drug component removed. – Jolenealaska Aug 11 '14 at 22:59
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    @Jefromi Hmmm, I'll accept "trade secret" (as I do in my answer), but I think the answerer at Skeptics is "drinking the kool-aid" provided by the marketers at Coke. I'll write a dissenting answer at Skeptics later. – Jolenealaska Aug 11 '14 at 23:05
  • @Jolenealaska Yeah, that was my best guess, it's just a little hard to tell from the sources - it's unclear whether the recipes people have managed to find are *exactly* right. – Cascabel Aug 11 '14 at 23:30
  • @Jefromi I doubt they're "exactly" right, but I think they're pretty darn close. The precise current formula *is* a trade secret, but I'd bet my left foot that the Pemberton recipe (it's only the 7X part that matters) is still pretty much what's in cans of coke today. – Jolenealaska Aug 11 '14 at 23:38
  • Good addendum. I think it's fair to say that the recipe is "secret" in the sense that you can't sell it without permission, but not in the sense that a determined person couldn't recreate it based on public information. It also seems that any secrecy is *really* just around the "7X ingredient". – logophobe Aug 12 '14 at 17:34
  • For anyone connected in any way with engineering (and Coke is engineered, not "prepared", let's not kid ourselves here), the reality of trade secrets and how they're protected is far more boring than the mystique surrounding them. They're usually well-documented within the company, the documentation being protected by a crapton of legal agreements and a stockpile of unrelated defensive patents. On the flip side, big corporations like PepsiCo will go to great lengths to *avoid* coming into contact with confidential information from other companies, because they don't want to end up in court. – Aaronut Oct 13 '14 at 01:29
  • Not to mention, the manufacturing process itself is usually far too complicated for any one person to just casually blurt out. It's not a "recipe" you could just make at home, not anymore, although I'm sure there are many recipes to produce something similar. But the process that Coca-Cola actually cares about protecting is the one that lets them churn out 2+ billion cans per year. That information would only be useful to someone who already has billions of dollars to spend on factories and process engineering. The average worker probably has access to this info and doesn't care/understand. – Aaronut Oct 13 '14 at 01:32
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Even IF it were so big a secret (as shown it isn't) that doesn't mean that people other than those who know it can't make the end product.
The "secret" only concerns one of the ingredients, the flavouring. This could be kept a secret, the people who know it mixing batches of it that get shipped in sealed containers to the manufacturing facilities of the end product.
In fact that's how it's often done in-house by companies with such secret formulae. The people mixing the secret part mix up batches, those get divided into buckets, bottles, whatever is appropriate, and from the secure facility where all this happens get shipped to the production lines. Whether it's common to do it like that or mostly just for show, I've no clue as I'm no employee of any such company :)
But it's no different from the way yeast cultures are preserved and distributed in breweries, or bacterial cultures in cheese factories. And I DO know about those.

And then of course if only a few people know the entire recipe, it's quite possible for a larger number to know part of it. You could have team 1 at facility 1 mix something, team 2 at facility 2 mix something else, ship both products to facility 3 where team 3 adds their ingredients to the mix of 1 and 2, yielding the final "secret mixture". Nobody on any of the three teams would know the entire recipe, and all would be under a strict NDA to not tell anyone the bit they do know.

jwenting
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