Coca-Cola’s secret recipe revealed after 125 years

Feb. 15, 2011 By: John Brownlee

 The radio show 'This American Life' has revealed the original Coca-Cola recipe—a secret the soda company has carefully guarded for more than 100 years. The show says Coca-Cola creator John Pemberton’s 1886 recipe was quietly published in 1979 in the Atlanta Constitution-Journal and no one noticed at the time. It has two parts. The first includes “fluid extract of coca,” citric acid, caffeine, sugar, water, lime juice, vanilla, and caramel. The second, called “7X,” includes alcohol, orange oil, lemon oil, nutmeg oil, coriander, neroli, and cinnamon. 

The secret recipe that lists the ingredients of every bottle of Coca-Cola is a thing of legend. Often described as one of the best kept secrets in the world, urban legend says that only two people in the world know the full secret recipe, and they are never allowed to fly on the same airplane lest it crash and the secret of Coke be lost to the tides of time forever. A contradicting report says that deep within Coke’s Atlanta, Georgia facility, armed guards stand outside a vault holding the only known copy of the secret recipe, ready to open fire upon any interloper who tries to steal it.

Of course, while fun, all of these stories are too implausible to be true. There is no way for a company pumping millions of gallons of a soft drink out its doors each year to keep the recipe totally secret: too many people need to know the ingredients to do their job. More importantly, since Coke is made of different ingredients in different countries (example: in Germany, it uses cane sugar; in America, it uses corn syrup), there’s no such thing as a universal secret recipe.

Even so, this is pretty impressive: after over a century, the secret recipe to Coca-Cola has finally been published by Ira Glass and his cohorts over at This American Life, a (fantastic) weekly radio program on Public Radio International (also available through iTunes). Yup, that’s the recipe above, which is also downloadable on This American Life’s official website.

After a hundred years of secrecy, you’d expect the secret ingredients to be pretty esoteric, but in actuality, it’s all stuff you might have in your kitchen, including: alcohol, orange oil, lemon oil, nutmeg oil, and cinnamon. I was hoping for at least a few eyes of newt.

Read more at This American Life