Long considered one of the most closely guarded trade secrets to ever exist, the true Coca-Cola formula is famously not available to the public so that the historic brand can preserve its iconic recipe.
But a science content creator from the United States now claims to have unravelled this mystery after a year of painstaking trial and error.
Playing up to the secret, Coca-Cola parades visitors to its Atlanta museum in front of an oversized steel vault that reportedly contains a handwritten note with the original recipe.
In the production process, all ingredients are shipped in unlabelled containers from a range of different facilities – each of whom is only informed of the bare essentials of what they’re making.
While the vast majority of the drink’s ingredients are clearly labelled on each bottle – one particular component is not, so-called “natural flavours”.
By using mass spectrometry, a technique that can measure the mass-to-charge ratio of ions, Labcoatz and his collaborators were able to split Coca-Cola’s individual ingredients into separate chemical readings.
The results from this research gave the YouTuber a solid foundation from which to tinker from, enabling him to slowly work out each missing piece of the jigsaw over a period of several months.
According to Labcoatz, the recipe is as follows:
- Carbonated water
- 104g Sugar
- 1mL flavour solution A (Dilute 20-21mL of the following mixture to 1L using 95% ethanol)
- 45.8mL lemon oil
- 36.5mL lime oil
- 8mL tea tree oil
- 4.5mL cassia cinnamon oil
- 2.7mL nutmeg oil
- 1.2mL orange oil
- 0.7mL coriander oil
- 0.6mL fenchol
- 10mL flavour solution B (Dilute the following to a volume of 1L using water)
- 320mL Shank’s caramel colour
- 175g glycerine
- 45mL 85% phosphoric acid
- 10mL vinegar (5% acidity)
- 10mL vanilla extract
- 8g win tannis
- 9.65g caffeine
Frustratingly for Coca-Cola, if Labcoatz’s research does turn out to be accurate, there is no legal recourse as the recipe has never been patented, precisely in order to protect its exact composition.
