Recipe for Coke? One More to Add to the File

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Recipe for Coke? One More to Add to the File
February 18, 2011
By ROBBIE BROWN and KIM SEVERSON
The New York Times

ATLANTA — Over the years, the public radio show “This American Life” has done some ambitious work. It was the first media outlet in the country to broadcast lengthy interviews with Guantánamo Bay prisoners. It sent reporters to Iraq for a month. And it exposed the misdeeds of a hedge fund.
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Gary Taxali

So what other topic could be so weighty, so captivating that it would cause the radio show’s Web site to crash under a stampede of visitors?

A soft-drink recipe.

The host, Ira Glass, revealed on last weekend’s show what he claimed was the original formula for Coca-Cola. He found it buried in a little-noticed article in the archives of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The recipe spread across the Internet, republished everywhere from CNN to Al Jazeera. A television show in Australia made its own Coke on air. Brewers in the United States swapped tips on finding the best sources for key ingredients like coriander oil and citric acid.

“It’s sobering,” Mr. Glass said. “We’ve done a lot of serious reporting on many serious things. But nothing that got the attention that we got from taking on a soft drink.”

Coke, as it always does, insists the recipe is inaccurate. The real formula, it says, remains in a bank vault in Atlanta.

America has long been excited by the promise of cracking the culinary code of its favorite foods. It is simple human curiosity applied to the meals we love most. Within families, aging cooks hold their place by refusing to give up the key ingredient to the Sunday spaghetti sauce until children can be trusted with the secret.

Companies, too, have long seized on the power of culinary secrets. KFC’s famous “11 herbs and spices” and McDonald’s “secret sauce” have helped make the companies billions.

The allure makes some loyal customers even more devoted. Not that long ago, normally right-thinking cooks got so obsessed with creating the Twinkie at home that Williams-Sonoma began selling the molds. Todd Wilbur, a former television reporter, has built an entire empire on selling top-secret recipes in books and on his Web site.

What’s notable is that some people now want to know secret corporate recipes with the passion others reserve for heirloom family recipes, said Laura Shapiro, a food historian and author.

When food made in factories became part of the American diet at the turn of the last century, it was marketed as clean, pure and close to homemade. Then, things changed. Marketers exploited the convenience, unique tastes and secret formulas that could come only from a corporate test kitchen. And Americans grew more intrigued.

“People think of packaged food as notably elusive,” she said. “Like how does that little blob of cream get inside the Hostess cupcake? Then you are curious and sometimes madly curious, as they are in this case.”

But no company has a history of secrecy quite like Coke, which claims that only a handful of senior executives know how to make the soda flavoring it calls “Merchandise 7x.”

In 1960, the author E. J. Kahn Jr. listed many of the original ingredients for Coke in his book “The Big Drink.” Then came the 1979 article in the Atlanta newspaper that “This American Life” rediscovered. And in the 1990s, the historian Mark Pendergrast found a recipe in the company’s own archives, written by the beverage’s inventor.

But in all of these cases, Coca-Cola denied their authenticity. Not that the company minds the attempts.

“What a tremendous tribute to this product that for 125 years nobody has been able to replicate the taste of Coca-Cola,” said Phil Mooney, the company’s archivist.

The company does not file trademark lawsuits against imitators because it would have to reveal the actual formula in court. With that protection assured, Mr. Pendergrast plans to release yet another early version of the recipe in the next version of his book “For God, Country and Coca-Cola.” He is already anticipating the public reaction.

“People want to have their cake and eat it, too,” he said. Even though they love learning secrets, they love having secrets. As long as Coke denies the imitations, many drinkers will continue to believe there is only one Real Thing.

Mr. Mooney, the Coke archivist, says other recipes only make Coke taste better by comparison. “They’ll make this recipe, and then they’ll come crawling back to Coke,” he told Mr. Glass. “Real Coke will have never tasted so good.”