With all the food/chemistry technology and knowledge that we have, how are things like the KFC biscuit recipe and the Coca Cola recipe still considered secret recipes?
In: Chemistry
Marketing.
There’s no secret really, someone even stole the Coke formulation once and tried to sell it. Coke’s competitors laughed them right to the cops.
With these low-cost foods there’s really no market for a KFC clone. KFC itself is already cheap as hell and you’re not gonna undercut them.
Rather than copycat, the competition in these markets are all about differentiation – Popeyes doesn’t want to remind you of KFC, they want to hook you on Popeyes.
Because there trade secrets, coca cola tastes a little different from pepsi and it’s that difference that sets them apart and makes them competitive. Here’s a neat little story I heard when I was a food science student in school. Sometime ago two employees that worked for coca cola stole the secret recipe. They went to pepsi to try and sell the secret to Pepsi. If I remember correctly this isn’t exactly illegal bc sense it’s a trade secret it isn’t patented and that’s the risk you run with a trade secrets. When they met with pepsi officials to sell them the recipe they turned them down and reported them to coca cola. One of the reasons this happened is because pepsi wouldn’t use the coca cola recipe anyways bc then there product would no longer be distinguished and would be less competitive.
With all the food/chemistry technology knowledge we have, how are supermarkets and fast food places still selling toxic poisonous crap as ‘food’?
They are only “secret” in the sense that the companies will never officially confirm what’s in them. And to a lesser extent because it’s not worth anyone’s time to risk legal liability over something so stupid.
It’s like if you made the recipe call for exactly .0532 grams of oregano. Everyone knows its oregano. When they make fried chicken, they just put in the amount of oregano that tastes best to them. Or if they want to get as close to KFC as possible, they play around with amounts and probably arrive at .05 grams of oregano. Or maybe .06.
Point is, everyone can make something which tastes for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from KFC fried chicken. They just can’t confirm it is exactly the same, and maybe it isn’t. But the recipe isn’t really “secret” except on a scale that is not important to anyone.
They aren’t secret, pretty much any chef can duplicate them with the time.
But what’s the point? You can’t make any money making and selling black market KFC or Cocacola. It would literally be more profitable to buy the real thing and re-sell it. Seamless and supermarkets do this. You’d make a hell of a lot more money working in a job at KFC or Coke than trying to compete with them.
It isn’t hard to figure out these recipes and produce a product that tastes identical. There are several colas that taste exactly like Coke and could easily fool consumers. As far as KFC goes, when I was a kid a KFC manager gave my mom the recipe, as it was not really guarded at the time. She made it at home and it was exactly the same.
The fact that these recipes are technically “secret” is just a marketing tool. It enables the companies to claim that everything else is an inferior knock off, regardless of how correct a copy it is.
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Yeah it’s a marketing gimmick. There are people on YouTube who have figured out Coca Cola’s recipe. But nobody is going to buy Joe’s Cola, even if it tastes the exact same as Coke.
KFCs secret is chickpea flour. The spices are easy to figure out. And it’s not “47” spices or whatever they claim. No one would do that. It’s to keep you away from trying.
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