Why is it so hard to backwards engineer the exact ingredients of coca cola?
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Answer: with backwards engineering any formula or recipe, the issue isnt so much the ingredients, but the quantities and specifically how it is made/mixed, the recipe. So one might easily discover what is in it, but without knowing the proprietary information, the actual recipe, you only have at most 1/2 of what you need, but more like 1/3 of the information.
Because even if you could determine the atomic elements and proportion of those elements, you still wouldn’t know the order, time, or processes by which they’re combined (ie the recipe).
Coca cola has made it extremely difficult for any one of their employees to gain enough knowledge to know exactly what ingredients are mixed in what proportions and recreate the production from there.
Even if one could, they would be going up against a company that already greatly benefits from having a nearly worldwide production/distribution chain already established and economics of scale, and also a lot of money spent on advertising and legal services if needed.
Coca Cola (and similar companies) have made it very difficult for even their own employees to access the “secret recipe” in order to prevent it from being duplicated.
Throughout the 20th century Coke spent a great deal of effort to make sure their recipe remained secret and unique.
But today secret recipes are just a marketing gimmick.
Companies the size of Pepsi have the resources to reverse engineer a recipe with only modest difficulty, but they don’t because exactly copying something that heavily trademarked will just result in legal action.
It’s not just the ingredients list, it’s also the methods they are handled/cooked, order/process by which they are mixed. It’s not just dump a bunch of raw ingredients into vat and it’s syrup conentrate to mix with carbonated water. There may be spices that are toasted, oils extracted/concentrated. What temp are things cooked at when mixed? Are they brought to a boil? How long is it cooked.
Coke’s “secret recipe” is mostly a marketing gimmick. Many companies know how to make cola. Some of these colas taste remarkably like Coke. Others intentionally differentiate themselves from Coke – Pepsi is famously a bit sweeter. The idea that Coke has an utterly unique and masterful secret recipe is just one of the many, many ways that they try to convince you that their soda is special.
So it’s entirely possible that some other cola is using the same recipe as Coke and just doesn’t realize or can’t prove it. The only advantage to maintaining the secrecy of the recipe is that any competitors who try to sell “Coke, but cheaper” won’t be able to claim that their product is definitely identical.
I’m imagining part of the reason no one has done this is that it wouldn’t be worth the investment. It’s likely not cost-effective to make Coca-Cola at home and even if someone cracked the code – or even got near it – it’s not like they could sell it for a profit.
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