A 25-minute YouTube video about chemistry doesn’t usually go viral and rack up 715,000 views in under 17 hours. But a new video by LabCoatz reveals that he’s cracked one of the most guarded trade secrets of the last 140 years: the recipe to make Coca-Cola, the world’s most popular soda/soft drink.
Recreating the taste of Coca-Cola certainly wasn’t easy. Almost everyone on Earth knows the very specific taste of the drink, which has been declared the world’s most popular non-alcoholic beverage. So getting it perfect took a lot of trial and error by LabCoatz. But it seems he has cracked the code… using science.
For those who don’t know, the actual recipe for the drink is actually hidden away behind a steel vault. Not even the workers at the Coca-Cola factories know the ingredients, as they all shipped unlabeled from different facilities. There’s a lot of secrecy involved.
LabCoatz spent the last year recreating recipes published on the internet, but none of them tasted quite right. “None of them tasted like real Coke,” the video explains. Many of them were just good calculated guesses that didn’t quite match the taste of the original. So LabCoatz went to work. With help from two other science YouTubers, they analyzed Coca-Cola down to its chemical fingerprint.
The data confirmed what everybody already guessed: sugar, caffeine, phosphoric acid, and caramel color. But there was more to the drink than just that. They were missing oils, spices, and trace compounds.
LabCoatz’s early experiments ruled out popular guesses like neroli and lavender. They made the drink taste floral and artificial. Clove also failed. Orange barely made the cut at one to two percent. Nutmeg, cinnamon, coriander, lemon, and lime also showed up.
But then came the huge breakthrough. The element that made all the difference and the missing piece in the puzzle: tannins. It’s the dry, mouth-coating compounds found in tea, which explains the elusive freshness usually attributed to coca leaves. Once wine tannins were added, the replica snapped into place. Side-by-side mass spectrometry showed near-identical profiles.
Then LabCoatz did a bunch of taste tests. And the results were very positive. “I wasn’t expecting it to taste so much like Coke,” one tester said. Another followed with, “If you sold this on the shelves, I’d buy it.”
Regular Coke drinkers could sometimes spot the difference, though. One guy gave it a 9.5 out of 10. But casual drinkers couldn’t tell the two apart.
But before you get too excited: LabCoatz isn’t selling a soda. This isn’t a business. I’m pretty sure he isn’t interested in selling the recipe either. It’s just a very good experiment. And it’s probably the closest anyone has ever gotten to recreating the original recipe.
Watch the video to see just how LabCoatz recreated the secret Coca-Cola recipe.
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Pepsi Cola’s Plant in Elk Grove, California has a 6”x 8″ wide white plastic Container that says; Component No.4 written on it and a Skull & Bones. That’s the Secret Ingredients in Pepsi Cola, Pepsi also makes Snapple Drinks.👍