Coca-Cola ‘secret recipe’ cracked, claims radio show

Though Coke denied it, a US radio show Tuesday claimed that it has cracked the more than a hundred years old mystery of Coca-Cola’s ‘secret formula.’

Atlanta-based Coca-Cola has kept its ingredient formula a closely guarded secret since 1886. The official copy of the original recipe is said to be kept in bank vault in Atlanta.

In their weekly hour-long news programme ‘This American Life’ on Chicago Public Radio Tuesday, the producers claimed that they unearthed the recipe from a newspaper photograph from 1979.

They said the photograph as well as an article on the history of Coca-Cola appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, claiming that the photograph is of a hand-written copy of the original recipe.

“The formula for Coca-Cola is one of the most jealously guarded trade secrets in the world. Locked in a vault in Atlanta. Supposedly unreplicable. But we think we may have found the original recipe. And to see if the formula actually might be Coke, we made a batch,” the producers of the show said.

They said when they matched the formula from the photograph with a recipe found by author Mark Pendergrast during his research on his book ‘For God, Country and Coca-Cola’ in the 1990s, they found both to be similar.

“Talking to historian Mark Pendergrast, author of ‘For God, Country and Coca-Cola,’ we were even more surprised when we found reasons to believe the recipe is real,” the producers claimed.

According to their findings, the first syrup part of the recipe has usual ingredients – caffeine, citric acid, fluid extract of cocoa, sugar, water, caramel, lime juice, and vanilla.

The second part of the recipe under the code-name ’7X’ – that carries the secret flavour formula – contains alcohol, orange oil, lemon oil, nutmeg oil, coriander oil, neroli oil and cinnamon oil, the producers said.

Denying that their recipe secret has been cracked, a Coca-Cola representatives told ABC News, “Many third parties have tried over time to crack our secret formula. Try as they might, there’s only one real thing. And that was not it.”

Because of huge traffic to the radio show, its website crashed.