Coca Cola's secret recipe revealed?

Interesting if it's true but ultimately Coke's strength lies in its worldwide brand[1] and distribution rather than having an unreproducible taste.<p>[1] Of course, being able to say <i>only two people know how to mix the 7X flavoring ingredient</i> is part of that brand.

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.<p>The spokesperson ("archivist") they found from Coca Cola implied that stories like this come up all the time.

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.

Reminds me of OpenCola <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink)</a><p>Am I the only one or does anyone else hate the unnecessary popup ad on time.com?

"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

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?

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.<p>Its an excellent book too, with the history of the new coke fiasco and the early years.

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.

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.<p>"They identified the Illinois-based Stepan Company as the importer and processor of the coca used in Coke. " <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/01/business/how-coca-cola-obtains-its-coca.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/01/business/how-coca-cola-obt...</a>

A better news story linked on that page is how four loko is being recycled into ethanol, lol<p><a href="http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/01/07/four-lokos-silver-lining-from-blackout-in-a-can-to-ethanol/" rel="nofollow">http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/01/07/four-lokos-silver-lining...</a><p>I'm against ethanol (because of corn welfare for millionares) but it's still an eye opening story.<p>ps. What's up with Time trying to be "hip" to the Reddit/Digg crowd?

Wouldn't this be equivalent to somebody finding out Google's exact ranking weights from 2005 ?<p>The recipe has changed/been tweaked alot &#38; the true strength of Google is now in its worldwide brand rather than its ranking algorithm.

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.

Related: This American Life's server crashed today under the load driven by the story:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222841" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222841</a>

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.

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

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

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

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