to me the impressive thing is Coca Cola was formulated in the 1800s and yet even with modern equipment - most people fail to replicate it.
the original chemist who made Coca Cola was a genius
I don't drink much soda, maybe a coke once a year. Over the years the taste of coke has changed. Every year when I get that craving and drink one, it tastes different. So either the recipe has changed multiple times and there isn't one true coke flavour, or my taste buds might be faulty.
You should try the Coke made in Mexico. Easiest way I find it is by searching for “Mexico coke” on uber eats or something similar.
Most stores carrying products made in Mexico have it.
Coke is actually very different from country to country and less so from state to state. This is because Coke uses local bottle companies and they might be using different water. The coke you buy at your local store is probably bottled somewhere close to keep shipping costs down.
If you're a fan of Dr.Pepper, you'll notice they have 2 different bottles based on where you buy. That's because in some regions, Dr.Pepper uses Pepsi for bottling and in others it uses Coke bottlers.
It's not only the water, there are more differences like high fructose corn syrup versus other sugar forms.
Fun fact: the most similar coke clone I've ever tasted was in Cuba.
Another one is that in many countries Coke and Pepsi use artificial sweeteners even in their "original" product lines, which is plainly misleading.
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.
Yes - not about coke but my understanding is that Heinz invested a lot of money over the years to standardise the taste across factories, countries and tomatoes themselves.
Coke itself is not consumed in a containerless 0g environment so the container itself imparts taste - hence why aficionados will often prefer glass over pastic or can. The bottling processing factory will also impart a taste, as will the local humidity which is why I often think drinks taste odd in Singapore.
My fav thing I heard was back in a chemistry lab someone told me a rumour coke had invested serious R&D into a plastic/surface that tastes like lemon to accommodate for the regular plastic taste that leaches from their bottles.
Coke in Singapore is a different recipe with less sugar.
[dead]
TIL
I actually had beer in mind for Singapore which I find somehow always tastes a bit off here...
That's my experience but I'm not much of a Coke drinker.
I recall some years ago Pepsi making the claim they could replicate Coke to the point of it being essentially indistinguishable but that's wasn't the point, their branding required Pepsi to be clearly differentiated from Coke—commercially that seems to make sense.
It's unclear how accurate Pepsi's claims are but they seemed to be based on tasting trials where people couldn't tell the 'clone' from the real thing.
Seems to me Pepsi was likely right, if we consider how close this formulation is to Coke and that it was produced with limited resources then one would expect Pepsi with its huge resources to grind their 'clone' as fine as they deemed necessary.
These days, Coke's 'secret' formula is more a publicity stunt than anything else.
Some 30 years ago, someone challenged me to tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke in a blind taste test. After taking several sips, I could eventually tell that one tasted just a little bit sweeter, more sugary, and the other one tasted just a tiny bit more... "dark" is how I put it at the time. (Note that I was using that word to describe a flavor, not a color. I do not have synesthesia, that's just the best word I could find to describe the subtle taste difference). I guessed that the slightly-sweeter one was Pepsi, and I turned out to be right.
Thing is, since doing that taste comparison where I alternated sips several times between the two, I've consistently been able to tell if a drink was Pepsi or Coke. So while they are very very close, they are distinguishable to some people, if those people have trained their taste buds. (Or at least they were up to about 10 years ago, I don't know if they've changed the flavor in the past decade because I practically quit drinking soda at all once I got serious about maintaining a healthy weight.)
In switzerland they once did the test on a TV show making people taste beverage of various colors. Most people would say it has the taste of a fruit of the same color while all the beverages had the same mint flavor.
Bottom line: the brain takes a lot of shortcut to allow us to take decisions quickly and is easily fooled. We aren't much better than a tiny LLM model really.
> Some 30 years ago, someone challenged me to tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke in a blind taste test.
I did something similar with co-workers recently, who didn't believe there is a meaningful difference between brands. I blind-tasted 6 different glasses and got each one right. I got my favorite (Coke) right just by the first smell, I just had to taste to see whether it was diet or not.
Not that this is a skill or anything. Its just that each of the brands I tasted has a strong characteristic flavor to me, and the difference between real sugar and artificially sweetened is also stark. I've been drinking diet versions for ages precisely because the sugary ones are just too sweet for me.
They’re easy to distinguish and I bet if I tell you how you can do it easily afterward.
Pepsi has more vanilla and lemon. If you go do a blind test now I bet you’ll find them easy to tell apart.
Pepsi can probably afford to run Coca Cola through a mass spec to get an idea of concentrations and even get the processed coca leaf used by Coca Cola (there’s one company in the uS with a license from the DEA).
Pepsi probably already have done this and likely Coke have done the same to Pepsi. However, Pepsi did also see what happened with New Coke and likely don’t wish to repeat that footgun of changing the formula. Plus people buy Pepsi because they want Pepsi not Coca-Cola
But the difference is Pepsi would also have had dedicated laboratories and food scientists, scientifically controlled exhaustive testing and unlimited access to any ingredient they wanted. Thus one would expect Pepsi's testing to have had much finer granularity than in this YouTube video).
With millions of dollars tied up in just a few percent of sales you can bet Pepsi knows just about as much as Coke does about Coke's ingredients (and vice versa of course).
The research for both companies is more about the fine minutiae—keeping an optimal differentiation between the two products more than treading on each other's territory. Trampling over each other for market share is done through advertising, not by making their products the same.
I think it's obvious that a corporation the size of Pepsi could replicate the taste of coke if they wanted to. But why would they - their customers buy pepsi because they want pepsi, not because they are looking for cheaper coke - pepsi is not even cheaper, it's just a different product. Just like 7up tastes different to Sprite.
This seems completely believable to me. They have tons of research scientists and chemists who do this for a living, and had access to the best equipment (even back in the day).
It probably didn’t take them terribly long to do it
Yes my observation too that coca cola is inconsistent. I have felt that too. Also glass bottled cold drink or canned cold drinks taste much better than plastic bottled ones. My favorite is glass bottled one. But have never found a glass bottled coca cola in my region. It's a distribution issue. So I also don't agree with claims in the video. I drink coca cola 8/10 times
Never liked the 20oz plastic Coke bottles. The aluminum cans and 2liter plastic tasted fine though.
yeah; the product ends up tasting SUPER acidic.
Diet Coke only tastes right from a small plastic bottle
Even the same drink tastes a little different at different temperature or if you use a plastic straw, metal straw, glass bottle, plastic bottle.
It is true: sweetness is very different across the globe due to nation preferences
I recall when I was a kid decades ago Coke wasn't as sweet as it is now (nowadays, I find it so sweet I no longer drink it).
It would be informative if we actually knew how much sugar was in say tbe wartime Coke of the 1940s compared with that of today. I reckon the difference would startle us.
"The amount of sugar in Coke hasn't changed in the last 40 years,…"
Likely so, but there's some evidence it's different in different markets. That's why I made my reference point the 1940s. I first tasted Coke in the late 1950s in a market outside the US and it was definitely less sweet than it is nowadays.
> The amount of sugar in Coke hasn't changed in the last 40 years
Except for when it has. e.g.: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/coke-cuts-sweetness-in-cana...
I too thought it was my palate and perhaps it's partially so, but it's also more than that. We're now in an era of 'engineered sweetness' to maximize sales.
Since around the 1970s food manufacturers have been increasing the sweetness of products to keep up with the population's shifting/increasing "bliss point". The "bliss point" is defined as the optimal sweetness of a product and it's been increasing over time from the constant bombardment of ultra refined food products. It seems we've adapted to the ready availability of readily available sweet stuff and now we need more to satisfy.
Decades ago, very sweet products weren't encountered to the same extent as today so the bliss point remained essentially static but in recent years as the average bliss point has increased manufacturers have increased the sweetness of products to compensate. There are many references to this, here's but one:
https://www.foodtimes.eu/consumers-and-health/bliss-effect-u...
Re Coke, when I was a kid, its sweetness depended to some extent on how it was obtained. Soda fountains before modern post mixing varied the radio of Coke syrup to soda which changed the perceived sweetness, also I believe in some countries the syrup came sans sugar (or largely so) to save on transport costs and was bottled (sugar ratios mixed) locally. This arrangement allowed local bottling to set the optimal bliss point for that market.
I remember kids whose parents owned a soda fountain could get the syrup and we'd mix it with soda to suit.
Incidentally, I'm in Australia and here the bottled Coke tastes different to what I've tasted in the US (could be sucrose versus fructose or sucrose/fructose mixtures as sucrose is usually the key sweetener used here).
More to the point, I've friends in New York and several of them have complained to me that they consider their local product not up to scratch and they prefer Coke that's bottled in Mexico whenever they can get it.
I cannot recall whether the Mexican Coke was sweeter or not, or if there was some other difference. Reason: whenever I ate with them they drank Coke whilst I stuck to beer.
Probably a different type of sugar too.
Not just across nations, but across packaging.
and water source has a great impact
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...
Coca leaf. Totally different plant. One is the source of chocolate, the other cocaine.
Yes, you're right. My mistake.
Maybe he could have paired it with an hplc reading.
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.
Spectrography can absolutely tell you concentrations if you compare it to a test solution with a known concentration.
He doesn't compare the mass spec of his final product to a real coke, unless I missed it.
You did miss it. It's quite close, but not identical. Wouldn't be surprised if different batches of coke have at least some variance anyway.
You 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.
or instdad of ethanol have brewed methanol.
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.
I'll say that the 'Zero' products have gotten quite good. Not indistinguishable, but closer than I expected. On a couple of occasions I've inadvertently purchased real Dr Pepper instead of Dr Pepper Zero and not realized I was drinking the real thing. That's high praise for the Zero version (notably, the Diet version of Dr Pepper, while it has a following of its own, is extremely unlike real Dr Pepper).
That's interesting. I'll need to find some Dr Pepper Zero and try it. My history of Dr Pepper and of diet sodas goes like this.
1. I only drank non-diet sodas. Pepsi was my favorite, Dr Pepper or root beer was the runner up at restaurants the had Coke (which I hate) rather than Pepsi.
2. At some point I started trying to reduce the percent of my calories that came from carbs. I was able to continue drinking non-diet soda and meet my goal but only because (1) I usually only drank a small glass with each meal, and (2) I was able to reduce carbs from other things enough to leave room for the soda.
3. That reducing from other things enough to leave room for the soda got annoying, so I made myself drink diet sodas for a few days. I quickly got used to Diet Dr Pepper and started to enjoy it. Diet Pepsi became OK, but Diet Dr Pepper was better. Once this switch was made and I didn't need to make room for soda carbs I could stick to my carb goal pretty easily.
4. After a few years of that, I had oral surgery. They advised me to not drink carbonated beverages for a week or so afterwards, so I drank water. I was actually fine with that so after two weeks I finished off the 2L bottles of Diet Dr Pepper in my fridge and then just drank water at home for the next few years. I would still have a Diet Dr Pepper or a Diet Pepsi or Pepsi Zero or Diet root beer on the few occasions I ate out.
If I ate out at a place that did not those I would sometimes get a non-diet Dr Pepper or Pepsi and it was terrible. It seemed too sweet. It tasted like someone had mixed some thick sweetener into it so not only was the flavor off the feel of the drink was wrong.
It was bad enough that I would no longer eat out at those places. I'd only get food to go from there.
So now I'm really curious if Dr Pepper Zero will taste good to me or not. If my problem with regular Dr Pepper is just due to the sugar I should probably be OK with Dr Pepper Zero. But if what I really now dislike is non-diet Dr Pepper's flavor it sounds like I'll also dislike Dr Pepper Zero.
Can confirm, could never stand the taste of Diet Coke, but Coke Zero tastes pretty close to the original to me! To the point that I pretty much never drink regular Coke anymore, if Coke Zero is available. There's basically no downside to going with Zero, imo. And the upside of no calories is pretty great.
Diet Coke is really the sugar free version of New Coke, now discontinued. It wasn’t meant to taste the same as Coca-Cola Classic.
> You mention about Dr pepper and how strikingly similar Dr Pepper zero is, what are some other drinks which have a genuinely similar.
Any of the Zero variants are worth a try, in my experience. Historically I choose Coke, and for quite a while I drank Coke Zero, which is pretty good. More recently in the last year or so I've fixated on Pepsi Zero, even though I've never really been a Pepsi fan otherwise. I also like Dr Pepper Zero, as I mentioned in my first post. I've never really liked any of the diet versions of soda, they just tasted too different to me.
Diet coke is much cheaper to produce, sugar is the most expensive part of coca cola by far.
IIRC, the diet versions of pepsi and coke are deliberately a bit different, while the zero ones are trying to taste the same as the regular ones.
unpleasant sensation on my teeth
That's more likely the phosphoric acid softening them.
Are you into any other super-processed sugar treats, out of curiosity?
If you cannot tell the difference between a cola and a lemonade, then that says more about the person performing the taste test than anything.
That link actually clearly says down in the body that they could pick the lemon lime out from the colas, which makes sense.
Throwing together sugar, acid, and carbonation does not overwhelm your sense of taste. Thats most bottled beverages. If you believe this, you should see a doctor.
But many beverages are very similar to other beverages. It’s not an inherent flaw in taste perception that Coke and Pepsi taste alike to most people, it’s that one was intentionally made to be only slightly different than the other.
Coke and Sprite taste extremely different.
Coke and Pepsi are a lot closer but still distinguishable.
They’re like siblings in neighbor family. You can tell immediately that they’re related, but they’re clearly separate entities.
Lol, and here I am choking in shock when I grab a sip from a sprite can instead of the coke that I thought it was. Turns out I was just blindly (literally) falling for marketing? I don't think so, Tim.
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.
Sounds as believable as that nonsense about onions tasting the same as apples if you hold your nose.
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.
Last I recall, you get different answers if you taste just a sip verses a larger amount. Pepsi has a good first taste, but after a couple of sips it's pretty overpoweringly sweet, even compared to other sodas.
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.
All Jello tastes the same, and that's a hill I'll die on. There are no flavors.
What. You do you, but that’s a highly unusual perception.
Check out the acquired podcast episode on Coca Cola. Amazingly reserached history on the business and evolution of the Coke forumla.
Yeah, it's a great listen:
> 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.
> Big Gulp!
I'm old enough to remember when that was actually the big size.
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.
I don’t drink cola and I’m usually not into chemistry videos, but this was genuinely entertaining. The "Mass Spectrometry" and “What do other people think?” segment was especially fun; great pacing and presentation. LabCoatz is my first chemistry channel subscription :)
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.
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”
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
To go down that rathole, here is Tom Scott talking about the NIST standard reference materials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvJzi0BXcGI
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”
Some of the most dimensionally accurate thickness aluminium foil you can buy is intended for cooking.
Coincidentally, Guinness had a role to play in the development of modern quality control.
Do we count the time some children measured the vitamin C in Ribena for a science fair, and discovered there wasn't any, despite high vitamin C being their main marketing point?
I just looked that up. Great story!
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?
One of the author-tagged comments, "fenchol is found in basil :)"
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 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.
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 thought it was well known that Coca Cola contained phosphoric acid. It's one of the reasons why it's so bad for your teeth.
It's explicitly listed as an ingredient, even.
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.
I've always assumed that's either the corn syrup or something else that's in the American version, because I swear growing up in Italy I never noticed this.
Haven't done a side-by-side comparison, though, so maybe it's just my memory of my childhood tastebuds.
I live in France and there definitely is this feeling. I may be biased, because I only drink coke zero, which has a distinct "dryness" to it wrt other sodas. However, it's the only non-zero soda where I notice this feeling.
Children have a much more sweet tooth than adults, so it may be the reason you did not notice it, as it would not necessarily register as bothersome. I liked to bite into direct sugar cubes as a kid, which I would definitely not stand today.
"cloying" is the word you're looking for for that sugar mouthfeel
Reminded me of the book Fast Food Nation where they describe the artificial flavor industry (Chapter 5), and visit labs in New Jersey where fast food tastes are created by "flavorists". Most of the taste comes from smell, via gas molecules released in the mouth.
The book also covers how they scout out real estate, and how they create french fries by shooting potatoes at 80 mph. (A bit different from in-n-out)
Note: don't bother watching the movie, it's nothing like the book.
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
At a high level: probably they buy flavors from the flavor houses by the rail car or tanker truck and mix them with water, sweetener, and gum Arabic. I’ve seen it at much smaller scale, but I bet Coke has some amazingly large machinery given the scale.
Could he patent-troll Coca cola?
He doesn’t want to change the world, he wants to sell sugar water!
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
There's a lot of reasons Carbonated Sugar Water, Inc. isn't a $200B business, and Coca Cola (tm) is, that "just a lot of sugar" doesn't even begin to explain.
Distribution network and marketing.
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!
Luckily I have zero battery terminals inside me. Any acid would eat the corrosion off a battery terminal. Orange juice probably works.
Chemistry is scary to those who don’t understand it because it gets used for this type of sophistry.
About the same acidity as lemonade. Less acidic than the stomach it is going into. There are far more pressing things to worry about in this world.
I'm drinking a coke right now. The reason? I like it.
Also I'm not sure how the pH level of a food is relevant to anything
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…
It's so entertaining how, like, 10 people jumped in to make fun of you for this idiotic pirouette!
I'd love to get hands on this coca cola's syrup. I know that this video has just recently released but I feel like this might help in producing indie levels of quantity of syrups which can be sold to indie users
I am not even much of a coca cola person. Usually I drink Pepsi or mountain dew but this video is one of the most high efforts video I have ever watched. Period.
massive respects to LabCoatz. I seriously didn't expect this level of quality, its shocking how good youtube is. This feels so professional and well thought of in a way
I am still in high school and I was studying chemistry. I don't enjoy chemistry (In fact I complain often so much about being forced to study chem to go to a decent CS uni that even AI LLM's wrapped of 2025 picked it up on my admittedly hate on chemistry https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/Imustaskforhelp)
I think that the chemistry (atleast what I study) is fundamentally different from the science shown here. This is the chemistry which genuinely attracted me. Studying biomolecules and seeing the structures some of them were even familiar.
I don't know but in a sense it kind of helps an genuine interest in the subject while being genuinely practical so I thank this video creator.
Some videos are just gems, this is one of them. I was constantly thinking surely Coke is so large of a company, everyone's heard of the secret, surely someone else must have made something so effective ( I was thinking of a large company) but it turns out that large companies dont really end up doing this and its the one man shop with genuine passion to his craft (in this chemistry) which really ends up doing spectacular.
Massive respects. Can't recommend it enough right now.
Also I am thinking of one thing but what if an non profit can be established who can produce such bottles of "lab cola" perhaps at a low-mid --> high scale.
I'd genuinely support and imagine that you can buy lab cola which can be environmentally safe and the proceeds go to social causes which you can align to. Wouldn't that just be amazing?
This opens up so much more possibilities!!
Edit: I thought about the non profit idea even more and I think that this can position itself as for fundraising as well. Imagine this genuine movement of slowly owning what we actually eat no more secret recipes. This seems to be the open source of Food and I am all for it!
If one worries about the supply chain, they can supply it via amazon or local providers (yes I know Amazon is morally shitty at times but I feel like this might answer some questions that people might have about that coca cola has worldwide presence, how is it gonna compete)
One could also bootstrap the whole thing and directly sell to customers or businesses as well (the businesses can have genuine value to it, I don't think that at scale, there is much of a difference in pricing and some amount of pricing gains are okay for what its worth if the mission is noble)
Best part is that Coca Cola can do nothing about all of it and the ideas are limitless, the bottleneck was the recipe which has now been effectively reverse engineered haha. There is a genuine ability for people to bring change in beverage industry. I am certainly hyped for what its worth. Someone please contact LabCoatz if you have affiliates and give him this idea if possible or anyone implement it themselves if they follow a similar field/expertise to this. If so, I would be your first customer for the non profit :)
I didn’t like studying chemistry at all when I was your age. But I also didn’t like physics until I took a class thar focused on it in a practical way. So definitely listen to your interests but perhaps you’ll find a better on-ramp to chemistry if you focus on food chemistry or something else more pragmatic.
But cheers for showing support to high quality science content on YT. Appreciation is a great instinct to nurture.
i did well at all the stoichiometry, and energy calculations, but i never thoguht of chemistry as something fun until i started seeing the variius youtube videos of figuring/designing out chemical and filtering processes and trying them.
unfortunately thast long after i might have learned how to do that problem solving. maybe if i go back to school ill try to find such classes. i imagine biochem also has a lot of that
No, I think my hate (Edit: Hate seems a strong word, I meant dislike perhaps, Its just that I usually blame chem for any grades loss because thats the reality more on that later) in chemistry stems from the fact that people are able to grasp it naturally for some reason and chem is considered very high scoring so its depressing and you resent the subject if you can't achieve score in chem (mind you, that where I live, the individual subjects score don't matter but the aggregate, so in essense, chem has equal weightage as much as maths or physics while being really simpler but still requires a fundamental grasp which I find unintuitive at times and somehow unable to understand so the system feels a little unfair to me at times in the unique situation but oh well) I still feel like I dont study chem that much when the feedback loop just exited when I was studying and didnt get marks so I decided to stop studying it that much but now I am starting to genuinely focus 100% on chem most of the time because I just have to remember a few things and instant boost in my marks (or so I am thinking, we will see how this goes but it seems to be the best utilization of my time right now)
I could probably blame some parts of the education system but I don't think that the system can probably change regarding it. Still, I just wanted to share my frustrations regarding it where everything kind of becomes overcompetitive while you have a hobby in computers and I feel like genuine passion towards computing/linux and other things and want to make it a job because in my case I feel like money's valuable only in the end to do something that I enjoy and in this case, I can get both paid and enjoy without having to go through a retirement phase (or so my thoughts on FIRE, I'd still invest/save most of the money as money is rather not the big part of why I am doing this in my opinion) and Chem doesn't have anything related to it for what its worth.
I still have to go read chemistry though. But I don't know why but something in this video genuinely clicked chemistry for me where I could watch a 100 videos like this (although the point can be that I am now doing it out of my own free will and not a rigorous syllabus with tests and rewards/punishments systems basically)
Sorry for the yap, just wanted to get it off my chest. I have nothing against chem as a subject tho, I am sure that its interesting and this video sorts of proves it but I feel like I am more inclined towards software engineering but it sucks that I have to study chem to go do what I actually want in life (which requires a degree for maximal benefit which requires good marks aka a decent/huge focus on chem as well right now)
> But cheers for showing support to high quality science content on YT. Appreciation is a great instinct to nurture.
Thanks! I appreciate it, Have a nice day!
(Also edit once again) but I want to touch on the reason why I feel appreciating it even more so is because a single guy is able to compete against (essentially) a 200 Billion $ GIANT.
Such levels of individual freedom and achievements should be celebrated by the society just for the sake of it (and in this case we can see some other benefits as well as I told in the initial comment)
They empower Individual youth and Individuals in general and its very empowering. Generally the same reason I love Open source as well. Bringing real change to the world and leaving a fingerprint on Humanity I suppose. Even small things like these provide me and maybe others hope against darkness created by system of corruption being witnessed most around the world and monopolization/ big businesses doing shady practices most often.
So full disclosure, I haven't watched the video, and I've already seen some couple comments since I always take a brief scan before I do.
That being said: The thing about soda that most people get wrong is the level of fizz. Nothing is comparable to commercial soda just based off that. So, when you start off from a lower level baseline of "your fizz" < "their fizz", and add in recipe differences...well, it'll be a fun watch, regardless.
Small edit on this: They used a soda stream, which definitely doesn't add as much carbonation as commercial equipment does. Based only upon that, the taste profile will end up different for most, and despite all the science involved, it will lead to the over use of other flavors to compensate. Respectable try, however. He should sell premixed stuff on his website, although I imagine that is a regulatory nightmare, given that some of the stuff he used isn't food grade.
They didn't use soda stream, I don't know what made you think that... They just used regular old bottled carbonated water.
if you watch to the end, he provides his final recipe, with the caveat that making the batch the first time will be pretty expensive, and also make sure you have good safety gear on sicne some of the ingredients are dangerous when not diluted.
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.
My country is going to require a recyclable plastic bottles. That means bringing empty plastic bottles full of air into a shop, so a machine can squash them and send somewhere.
This will bring down marketshare significantly. It's incredibly hassle, which is likely the point. I am looking for good and cheap sodastream cola syrup, but they are very expensive.
In Australia Coca-Cola isn't allowed to import coca leaf extract for flavor, so it tastes very similar to one of the 3rd party knock off brands you'll find in the US. In Australia everyone drinks Pepsi because of this. Without the coca leaf Coca-Cola tastes imo pretty terrible.
What makes this video revolutionary is he was able to find an alternative to the coca leaf that has a near identical flavor. If it's as good tasting as advertised this knowledge could empower 3rd party producers to make a coke drink that will finally rival Coca-Cola in popularity.
There is nothing true in this comment
* Importing coca-cola extract with coca extract is legal
* Coca Cola is significantly more popular than Pepsi in Australia
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)...
I formulate, bottle, and sell beverages and I’ve used many of these ingredients. They are very potent, so yeah, the ingredients other than sugar are only a tiny fraction. They can be hard to source in small amounts sometimes though.
The non-nutritive sweeteners in their pure form are wild too. They are 2 + orders of magnitude sweeter than sugar and they come in very fine powders. You have to mask up when you work with them if you don’t want to taste vague sweetness for awhile.
I would bet that supermarket brand cola would sell more than it does now if it were closer to Coke.
I think sooner or later, everyone who drinks a lot of soda will try the store brand as well as other colas that are non-belligerents in the cola wars. Some of them are ok, some are good for some mixed drinks, some are so bad I won't even finish the pack. Even though I prefer Pepsi, if I knew brand X was pretty close to Coke, I might choose it when it costs less and money is tight.
Both Pepsi and Coke did make beverages people preferred. The Pepsi challenge did make some dent in their market share (but Coke is doing just fine) and New Coke ended up just selling more old Coke. So your story checks out
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wow, this is by far the most random "orange man bad" I ever saw.
Huh there is so much limonene in Coca Cola?! Limonene works as a very good…pesticide and herbicide! I did a research project on limonene like 10 years ago with my mentor and it outperformed most commercial pesticides in controlled settings. It really can't be that great to ingest.
It's also anti-inflammatory and an antioxidant, and you can get it either by eating citrus fruits or in pills as supplements.
There's a lot of things that aren't great for you at one quantity but are better or necessary at another.
As they say, the most dangerous thing in the ocean is the water.
One grape can kill a dog, does that mean it must be harmful for me to ingest?
Inventing and replicating face different challenges though.