Perfect meaning tasters would be initially fooled, but would correct themselves and note that the tastes were slightly different in A/B testing. The formula wasn't cracked it was emulated to a high degree of accuracy.
I didn't watch the video, but assuming they used a mass spectrometer, the end result will be identical to the real thing, anyone tasting otherwise is deluding themselves.
The video explains how the gas based mass spectrometers he had (indirect) access to don't normally pick up nonvolatile compounds like tannins. It was a big breakthrough that since he didn't have cocoa leaf extract, and he basically nailed everything else, he couldn't really understand what he was missing until he realised the extract would likely contain tannins.
So there may be other nonvolatile compounds which nevertheless impact the flavour profile. While a lot of flavour is in your nose, not all of it is...
Someone once said the reason we had alcohol before civilization is that we carry around a chemical testing laboratory in our faces.
It just so happens that everything in beer that can go wrong and hurt you (any sooner than cancer) creates a distinct aftertaste and you can learn to avoid it rather easily.
The only exception of course is if you use poisonous ingredients in the first place.
There have been a number of taste tests that show that, when blindfolded, most people can't distinguish between Coke and Sprite, let alone Coke and a close imitation, without the visual cue: throw together enough sugar, acid, and carbonation, and it overwhelms the body's ability to distinguish taste. It's a story often repeated in marketing (like Twitchells' Branded Nation), because forging a distinction between indistinguishable parity products is marketing's job.
I think if you believe this I'd recommend trying it yourself.
I've done this blinded with colas, and it's pretty easy to tell the difference between Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Pepsi, and Diet Pepsi. You might not know which is which without some history drinking them, but they all taste very distinct by themselves.
Really disagree that these are indistinguishable parity products, or that most people would not be obviously able to tell the difference between them.
This is irrelevant and misleading. Just because many people cannot tell flavors apart doesn’t mean that the products are parity and are marketing differentiated.
Sure the majority of people cannot tell flavor notes apart but there exists a certain % of the population that can very reliably distinguish different tastes. Wine sommeliers, fine dining, food science are all professions which require a sensitive palate and smell and it is an over simplification to talk about sodas tasting the same for the majority of people as if it implies there is no difference or speciality in crafting taste.
Most people prefer Pepsi's taste. Unless the brands are revealed, then the brand recognition sets in and your brain rewards you more for choosing Coca Cola (c)
So you can taste it, but that doesn't matter in the end.
Supposedly Jell-O was originally to be clear but they needed the food coloring to convince your brain you weren’t just tasting sugar and citric acid instead of the little bit of flavor they added per recipe.
The concentrate is produced by Ballina Beverages, then regional bottlers add the bulk ingredients like sugar and water. Hence every version being a little different.
And that's just bottlers. Fountain soda is also diluted from concentrate. So local water can affect the flavor, as can the calibration of the soda fountain. The better retailers will carbon-filter their water and check calibration regularly but the average convenience store? Varies wildly.
Random tidbit from my youth: when the Coke truck would come deliver a crate of Coke bottles to our house in Mexico, each Coke bottle had a little stick of sugarcane in it. I don't think it was like that in all places in Mexico. Street vendors would have giant unlabeled jugs of Coke, and sell it to you by pouring it into a plastic bag with a straw in it.
One of the really interesting thing (to me) in this video is that the very distinctive "your whole mouth sticks and is slimy from the sugar and even your teeth feel different" can be traced from a single component that's added seemingly for this purpose. And it's the thing I can't stand with regular non-zero coke (well the sugar level too, but that's pure health thing).
It would also be very interesting if he could get his hands on coke from different markets as the formulation varies from country to country. One of the most obvious is the amount of cinnamon, but it would be very interesting to know if more differences were there.
Another interrogation of mine would be if, sugar aside, the formula is different between regular coke and coke zero. I'd bet is is, simply to offset the aftertaste that aspartam/artificial sweeteners have, but I'm curious if other non-sweetness related ingredients do change.
Now I am wondering are there any industrial processes that use a common commercial product as a standard?
Coke, Guinness, etc all probably have exquisite quality control. Is it in the manual of any equipment, “congratulations on your new FooBar pH meter. To confirm the correct operation, a CokeCola should give a reading of X”
I was more imagining a completely pedestrian sourced sample. Those are likely large aggregate pools to minimize heterogeneity. Looking for something like, “Go to corner store, buy 12 pack canned CokeCola (with aspartame), dilute 1:10, measure”
Quite informative, and a laundry list of flavor names/chemicals that sound far more dangerous than they taste. Interesting find is vinegar, which might have offered a small germ-fighting benefit and given Coca Cola the 'medical' qualities it initially sold for...
The ingredients he uses are not necessarily what CC uses, but they're just a way to replicate the flavor profile. Notably he lacks the coca extract so he has to make up for it.
It was a reformulation from a popular drink where wine was infused with coca leaves and kola nuts, popular with Pope Leo XIII who appeared on poster advertisements for it. (and many others)
Georgia passed prohibition and coca-cola was an invention to replace the now banned beverages.
It would be interesting to know more about how it's actually manufactured and whether he has ideas about why the classic formula was changed -- maybe something to do with the cost of one of the steps, which the video suggests could be true, as it's damn complicated
I didn't see the full video, but in a nutshell its quite some effort.
For a person who has a bad tastebud like me, every dark colored carbonated drink tastes almost the same to me :(
that's a very oversimplification of it. how people can be willing to consume a beverage that can be used to eat the corrosion off of battery terminals is beyond me. so they'd be missing that on top of the sugar, unless of course they are drinking the sugar free versions, then it's just the battery cleanser
The marketing and trademark is more important than the formula. If you created and sold a perfect Coke clone you wouldn't make a dent in their market share. You could make one better than Coke and not make a dent because it wouldn't be Coke.
I think his idea was to make a very close copy that costs very little compared to the finished product, to e.g. save cost of your own consumption (in the video it says he made a mixture that can be mixed with water and sugar to create 5000 liters of Coca-Cola)...
Check out the acquired podcast episode on Coca Cola. Amazingly reserached history on the business and evolution of the Coke forumla.
Perfect meaning tasters would be initially fooled, but would correct themselves and note that the tastes were slightly different in A/B testing. The formula wasn't cracked it was emulated to a high degree of accuracy.
Coke isn’t even consistent between factories, different bottle sizes and cans.
Never liked the 20oz plastic Coke bottles. The aluminum cans and 2liter plastic tasted fine though.
It is true: sweetness is very different across the globe due to nation preferences
I didn't watch the video, but assuming they used a mass spectrometer, the end result will be identical to the real thing, anyone tasting otherwise is deluding themselves.
The video explains how the gas based mass spectrometers he had (indirect) access to don't normally pick up nonvolatile compounds like tannins. It was a big breakthrough that since he didn't have cocoa leaf extract, and he basically nailed everything else, he couldn't really understand what he was missing until he realised the extract would likely contain tannins.
So there may be other nonvolatile compounds which nevertheless impact the flavour profile. While a lot of flavour is in your nose, not all of it is...
This is wrong.
Same with perfume knock-offs
Spectrometer doesn’t tell you quantities, mixes, what have you.
You can emulate 90% of the first smell but never in life you can replicate entire bouquet, aftersmell, propriety molecules, etc.
He doesn't compare the mass spec of his final product to a real coke, unless I missed it.
Taste buds can detect chemicals in as concentrations as low as a few parts per million, I dunno.
Someone once said the reason we had alcohol before civilization is that we carry around a chemical testing laboratory in our faces.
It just so happens that everything in beer that can go wrong and hurt you (any sooner than cancer) creates a distinct aftertaste and you can learn to avoid it rather easily.
The only exception of course is if you use poisonous ingredients in the first place.
Mass spec is indeed demonstrated multiple times
There have been a number of taste tests that show that, when blindfolded, most people can't distinguish between Coke and Sprite, let alone Coke and a close imitation, without the visual cue: throw together enough sugar, acid, and carbonation, and it overwhelms the body's ability to distinguish taste. It's a story often repeated in marketing (like Twitchells' Branded Nation), because forging a distinction between indistinguishable parity products is marketing's job.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1982/0...
I think if you believe this I'd recommend trying it yourself.
I've done this blinded with colas, and it's pretty easy to tell the difference between Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Pepsi, and Diet Pepsi. You might not know which is which without some history drinking them, but they all taste very distinct by themselves.
Really disagree that these are indistinguishable parity products, or that most people would not be obviously able to tell the difference between them.
[delayed]
This is irrelevant and misleading. Just because many people cannot tell flavors apart doesn’t mean that the products are parity and are marketing differentiated.
Sure the majority of people cannot tell flavor notes apart but there exists a certain % of the population that can very reliably distinguish different tastes. Wine sommeliers, fine dining, food science are all professions which require a sensitive palate and smell and it is an over simplification to talk about sodas tasting the same for the majority of people as if it implies there is no difference or speciality in crafting taste.
Yea, you've never drank the off brand stuff I see. It's generally significantly different to me.
Most people prefer Pepsi's taste. Unless the brands are revealed, then the brand recognition sets in and your brain rewards you more for choosing Coca Cola (c)
So you can taste it, but that doesn't matter in the end.
Their example wasn't even Coke vs Pepsi but Coke vs Sprite.
Supposedly Jell-O was originally to be clear but they needed the food coloring to convince your brain you weren’t just tasting sugar and citric acid instead of the little bit of flavor they added per recipe.
Some of the interesting discovered flavor components in this trial were tea tree and basil (not shown in the video).
Yes I'm surprised basil wasn't included. How did you find out if it wasn't in the video?
For other science buffs out there,
https://www.youtube.com/@MassSpecEverything
is a great resource. He breaks down lots of the things you might be interested in.
> Perfectly Replicating Coca Cola
Which version ? In EU it tastes different in almost every country.
The concentrate is produced by Ballina Beverages, then regional bottlers add the bulk ingredients like sugar and water. Hence every version being a little different.
And that's just bottlers. Fountain soda is also diluted from concentrate. So local water can affect the flavor, as can the calibration of the soda fountain. The better retailers will carbon-filter their water and check calibration regularly but the average convenience store? Varies wildly.
Do you have fountain soda in your convenience store? I've usually only seen that in fast food places (am european)
Yes, convenience stores here often have self-serve fountain soda.
yes it's very common in the US. See: Big Gulp!
Random tidbit from my youth: when the Coke truck would come deliver a crate of Coke bottles to our house in Mexico, each Coke bottle had a little stick of sugarcane in it. I don't think it was like that in all places in Mexico. Street vendors would have giant unlabeled jugs of Coke, and sell it to you by pouring it into a plastic bag with a straw in it.
One of the really interesting thing (to me) in this video is that the very distinctive "your whole mouth sticks and is slimy from the sugar and even your teeth feel different" can be traced from a single component that's added seemingly for this purpose. And it's the thing I can't stand with regular non-zero coke (well the sugar level too, but that's pure health thing).
It would also be very interesting if he could get his hands on coke from different markets as the formulation varies from country to country. One of the most obvious is the amount of cinnamon, but it would be very interesting to know if more differences were there.
Another interrogation of mine would be if, sugar aside, the formula is different between regular coke and coke zero. I'd bet is is, simply to offset the aftertaste that aspartam/artificial sweeteners have, but I'm curious if other non-sweetness related ingredients do change.
Now I am wondering are there any industrial processes that use a common commercial product as a standard?
Coke, Guinness, etc all probably have exquisite quality control. Is it in the manual of any equipment, “congratulations on your new FooBar pH meter. To confirm the correct operation, a CokeCola should give a reading of X”
Coincidentally, Guinness had a role to play in the development of modern quality control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset
The government has reference products that a lot of processes use. https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductList?categoryId=a0l3d0000...
one that gets mentioned occasionally on the internet is the peanut butter: https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2387
I was more imagining a completely pedestrian sourced sample. Those are likely large aggregate pools to minimize heterogeneity. Looking for something like, “Go to corner store, buy 12 pack canned CokeCola (with aspartame), dilute 1:10, measure”
Quite informative, and a laundry list of flavor names/chemicals that sound far more dangerous than they taste. Interesting find is vinegar, which might have offered a small germ-fighting benefit and given Coca Cola the 'medical' qualities it initially sold for...
The ingredients he uses are not necessarily what CC uses, but they're just a way to replicate the flavor profile. Notably he lacks the coca extract so he has to make up for it.
I was surprised to see nausea meds for kids that's phosphoric acid and sugar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose/fructose/phosphoric_ac...
I think that the cocaine was the origin of its medical debut.
Cola nut also contains caffeine, so quite an energy drink between the two.
It was a reformulation from a popular drink where wine was infused with coca leaves and kola nuts, popular with Pope Leo XIII who appeared on poster advertisements for it. (and many others)
Georgia passed prohibition and coca-cola was an invention to replace the now banned beverages.
Is that tonic wine? Like buckfast?
Same kind of thing as Buckfast, long out of production but somebody tried to revive it a decade ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mariani_pope.jpg
It would be interesting to know more about how it's actually manufactured and whether he has ideas about why the classic formula was changed -- maybe something to do with the cost of one of the steps, which the video suggests could be true, as it's damn complicated
I didn't see the full video, but in a nutshell its quite some effort. For a person who has a bad tastebud like me, every dark colored carbonated drink tastes almost the same to me :(
You are not missing anything though.
Just a lot of sugar
that's a very oversimplification of it. how people can be willing to consume a beverage that can be used to eat the corrosion off of battery terminals is beyond me. so they'd be missing that on top of the sugar, unless of course they are drinking the sugar free versions, then it's just the battery cleanser
> how people can be willing to consume a beverage that can be used to eat the corrosion off of battery terminals is beyond me.
Wait 'til you find out what water can do.
I do get your point, but really, it's just corrosive in a different way than the usual highly corrosive stuff we consume daily.
> can be used to eat the corrosion off of battery terminal
That's just acidic, orange juice will do the same thing. But perhaps you are amazed people are willing to consume orange juice too!
Lemonade (made from real sugar, water and lemons and nothing else) can also eat the corrosion off of battery terminals...
Let me tell you about this thing called saliva…
The marketing and trademark is more important than the formula. If you created and sold a perfect Coke clone you wouldn't make a dent in their market share. You could make one better than Coke and not make a dent because it wouldn't be Coke.
I think his idea was to make a very close copy that costs very little compared to the finished product, to e.g. save cost of your own consumption (in the video it says he made a mixture that can be mixed with water and sugar to create 5000 liters of Coca-Cola)...