Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophes Quick Tips, where Jon O’Guin takes a deep dive into funky facets of food culture and returns with pearls and/or pissed-off eels latched onto his arm. (He’s kinda bad at diving. It’s why he stopped doing it years ago. He’s just too damn buoyant, despite also being, in the words of Chicago comedian Quinn Hatch “One dense motherfucker.” Literally none of this aside is false.) ANYWAY, the topic we’re taking on today is Coca-Cola. The drink, the company, the phenomenon, and some of the weirder (and darker) aspects of the company’s history.  

The Beginning

Coca-Cola is a drink with a name that’s either brilliant or stupid once you know the history. See, the original drink was made from Coca extract…and caffeine from Kola nuts. Coca-Cola is basically the original version of like, all those apps that change one letter from a normal word, or drop an E. Or, like how Sprite has their new “Lymonade” flavor

And yes, as people will tell you, the original Coke formula had cocaine in it. Technically. From another technical standpoint, it had essence of Coca in it, which happened to contain some cocaine. This is a little like how technically most poppy seeds have SOME opium in them, just not actually enough to MEAN anything. Like, the opium you would use to actually get high is like, 5,000-30,000 micrograms, and a teaspoon of poppy seeds is 300 nanograms. For comparison, that means you would need roughly 21.7 GALLONS of poppy seeds to get the same amount of opium as in the weak shit. Irritatingly, many drug tests are set to detect up to 1.2 Micrograms…or roughly 1 tablespoon of poppy seeds. Which is why, yes, some people do test positive for drug tests the day after eating a poppy seed muffin or bagel.

The Breakfast of Accidentally Incriminated.

You’ve also probably heard about how the Coca Cola recipe is a secret, known to only two men, who only know half of the recipe at any given time. And that…is well, A, it’s just wrong, and B, it’s also probably not true. (which, yes, ARE different things). The first wrong part is that Coca-Cola’s company rule is that only two men know the formula, but they both know ALL of it. The “each one only knows half” thing is actually a cross over from other corporate secrets. KFC, for instance, DOES have one factory mix up half of its 11 Herbs and Spices, another mix up the second half, and a third mix the two halves together. Which…are they stating that no one in the third factory has the time or interest to pick out the 5-6 ingredients in the two batches they get? That doesn’t feel like a long-term solution. But what do I know of corporate espionage? (He asked, his voice weirdly high-pitched and his body posture suddenly tense.)

“Now, could you repeat that last sentence slower, and closer to my pocket protector?”

The “not true” part is one of those things where, back when the story was first being spread, it was known in-company to be false: there were multiple employees who could make the flavoring syrup, none of whom were the “two men”. (Nowadays, since they’ve automated and divided much more of the production schedule, it might be true.) Second…well, we might already HAVE the original recipe, or at least something pretty close. See, Coca Cola was invented by a guy named John Pemberton, and people have found (and had vicious legal battles over) notes IN HIS HAND, detailing the recipe for a type of carbonated drink using Kola Nut caffeine, Coca Leaf extract, and all the other expected ingredients.

Now, the Coca-Cola Company says these recipes aren’t accurate, implying that they’re likely a DRAFT of the recipe, implicitly one he refined to make “true” Coke. On the other hand, Coca Cola also changed the recipe, both in 1903 (when they took out the cocaine. 11 years before it became illegal, good for them) and then in 1920 (and then later in the 80s, but we’ll get to that). So saying ‘your recipe isn’t accurate to what we make’, when you CHANGED what you make, several times, could be a bit of a “technically correct” sort of argument.

What’s mainly interesting is the flavors used in the supposed recipe:  it is BONKERS. Like, set aside the straight-up essentials oils used in it for a second: the base of the drink used a QUART of Lime juice, an entire ounce of vanilla extract, and 30 POUNDS of sugar, in 2.5 gallons of water, along with actual caramel stirred in. THEN comes the 2.5 ounces of Essential oils: which are a mixture of Orange, Lemon, Cinnamon, Coriander, Nutmeg, and Neroli, an essential oil derived from steam distillation of the flowers of Seville (Bitter) Orange trees. (You specifically have to include “steam” there, because other distillations produce “Orange Blossom” oil, which is sweeter.)

I was unaware Seville oranges grew on thorny trees. Do normal oranges do that? Or did the tree with the LESS delicious fruit go to GREATER lengths to protect it?

Scientific American made this recipe, and their conclusion is: It tastes a little more vanilla-y, and it’s a lighter brown, but otherwise it tastes like Coke.

So that’s what Coke IS (or rather, “maybe was”) What else is there to say about it?

Nobel, and Not-So-Noble, Intentions

It should not surprise you, dear readers, if you saw my Youtube channel recommendations last week, that I am left-leaning in my politics. That is not a stance I apologize for, but I do attempt to minimize it in my posts, in order that more people can read and learn the facts of food history, creation, and so on, without feeling personally attacked, as so often discussions of politics can do. Which is why I’m going to recommend that those of my readers not seeking to be challenged in this way only read the next two paragraphs, before departing the post, with some interesting information about Coca-Cola. Things get…messy…afterwards.

Here’s one fact we can clear up off the bat: people like to say that Coca Cola came up with the modern image of Santa, and that’s…kind of true, but not really. The Santa Claus/St Nicholas of America was already a fat man with a big white beard.  If nothing else, the fact that “A Visit from St Nicholas” (aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas”) was written 30 some odd years before the first Coca Cola Santa ads, and Harper’s Weekly had Santa drawings 40 years before the Cola ads. Hell, Coke wasn’t even the first SODA company to make Santa ads: White Rock did it first. Coke just took the work of those artists, did their own version of it (slightly cheerier facial features, more obviously happy, etc) and distributed that image nationwide. Some people think that Coke might have stabilized Santa’s coat being red, since some artists changed between Tan (since it was originally just a fur coat), Green, and Red, and maybe that’s true.

I personally love that White Rock soda was not afraid to imply that Santa needs a fifth of Whiskey to get through all your damn letters.

Another fun/inspiring story is the time they fought against racism! Yes, decades before Pepsi tried to show that they could bridge the divide between protestors and cops with a…valiant attempt at an ad campaign with one of the Kardashians or Jenners (Kendall, I think? I shame myself with this, but I think I recognized her from Lil Dicky’s Freaky Friday video.) Coke used a much different tactic to bring together disparate factions: Brute economic force and blunt intimidation. The language of the people! See, in 1964, Dr Martin Luther King Jr won the Nobel Peace Prize. And Atlanta decided to hold a dinner in his honor! Which the elite whites of segregated Atlanta said “But what if we didn’t go to a [EXPLETIVE DELETED] dinner for a jumped-up [SLUR DELETED]?” To which Coca Cola said “The man got a NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. You will hurt my sales internationally if you insult this man like this. I swear to EXPLETIVE-DELETED God, if you embarrass me in front of the world, I will leave you. You will come to this dinner, or Coca Cola will leave Atlanta, and you can STARVE without us.” The dinner sold out all its tickets, and was, reportedly, a fine event. Yay for…anti-racist extortion? Corporations: even when we do good, it’s kind of ominous!

Speaking of the ominous actions of corporations (and this is where I suggest my more right-leaning friends depart), let’s talk about the Coca-Cola Murders!  Tragically not a fun serial killer who drowned his victims, or dissolved their bodies in Vats of Cola or anything cool like that, “the Coca Cola murders” or “coca Cola killings” refer to several prominent murders of union leaders in Colombia in the 90’s. Some context: Colombia has a…”thing” about communists that is…well, it’s kind of our fault. Remember that whole Cold War she-bang? Well, in the late 50’s and 60’s, we rolled up to the Colombian military, and went, “hey, wouldn’t it suck if communists took over your country?” To which they said “Qué?” because in traditional American fashion we forgot a translator. We quickly sorted that out, and trained the Colombian military to make “counter-insurgent” squads, who could hunt down communist cells plotting to overthrow the country. These guys…well, you know that old saying “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?” Within 30 years they had become a sort of shadow-military that ran the Colombian drug trade including the majority of cocaine (hey, look, the cocaine came back!) , and who had a habit of identifying “worker’s unions” as “communist cells plotting the overthrow the country” and murdering the shit out of them. Notably, this was several years AFTER the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like, according to some reports, in 2001, 60% of all murdered unionists globally were killed IN COLOMBIA.

¡Somos Primeros del Mundo!

Specifically, in 1996, a group of these guys rolled up to a Coca Cola bottling factory, shot the head of the local union, burned the office of the union, and told all the workers “hey, if you’re still in this union when we show up tomorrow, you’re getting the same as that guy.” They then spent the next month hanging out at that factory, which never called anyone to come make them leave.

This was reported, as the kids say, as “fuckin’ suss” by the union, who claimed that the group was ASKED to come by a manager at the plant, and that the company and Coca Cola were criminally negligent in failing to protect their workers, and in league with the paramilitary group, since no one forced them to leave, making them culpable for the deaths of the union members. They attempted to sue in Colombia but it turns out people are less likely to pick fights with the dudes who have friends in the normal army, control all the cocaine, and regularly murder people who disagree with them. So they tried to sue in the US, which didn’t go very far, because no one could prove the Paramilitary group HAD been called, by either Coca Cola or their bottling companies, and…well, because if Coca-Cola was able to bully racists to attend a dinner for a Civil Rights leader in 1964, they sure as shit had more power than Colombian unionists in 2003. 

Ah man. That felt kind of sad. Wanna hear a story about a time Coke got screwed over by right-wing politics? No? WELL TOO BAD.  

There is Nothing New under the Sun

Let’s talk about New Coke. And in case you don’t know about it (which would be difficult, it was referenced in the latest season of Stranger Things, and has been a go-to joke about corporate decisions for decades), let’s first explain what it was: In the 1980’s, Coke had a problem. It was losing, plain and simple. In blind taste tests, people liked Pepsi better. Fewer and fewer people were buying Coke, ESPECIALLY since they had revealed Diet Coke. They had accidentally screwed up their own market share by creating a product that pulled their own customers away from them. This greatly worried Coke, because Pepsi already had an effective ad campaign resting on that “more people like our taste”, and within a couple years, they were going to be able to say “more people buy our soda” too.

So, Coca Cola said “you know what? It’s been 60 some-odd years since we did anything to our soda flavor. Let’s make a new version of it, something more like Pepsi or Diet Coke, and see if people like it.” So Coke did, and they did. In fact, they liked it MORE. So Coke said “great. We’ve got this new version of Coke. People like it more…do we keep making the old one?” And they decided the answer was “no”. Which makes perfect sense: they were ALREADY having trouble with Diet Coke reducing Coca Cola sales, if they tried to run both products, they’d end up splitting the market, and Pepsi would get the win Coke was trying to deny them. So they decided to discontinue Old Coke, and launch New Coke.

A plan that worked out great for everyone.
(Also, weird side note: Coke, in internal memos, actually discussed the New Coke launch and campaign as being the marketing equivalent (and a feat of scheduling and logistics ECLIPSING) the D-Day invasion. So THEY’RE the ones who compared it to World War 2 first.)

This was a FIASCO for Coca Cola, because it turned out that some people were furious that Coke would change something that was a tradition to them. Something with meaning and history to their family. You know, the flavor of the soda.

They hated it. By which I mean they were very performative in their disgust for it. In actuality, in Blind taste tests, even they preferred New Coke. The leaders of the anti-New-Coke Movement PREFERRED the thing they were protesting. And that’s because this wasn’t ABOUT the soda. (Hell, one of the leaders of the movement actually couldn’t DRINK Coke.)  Oh no, this was about something else.  

See, in the taste tests, they’d noticed that, about 1 in 10 people, despite liking or preferring the New formula, reacted VERY negatively to the idea of it replacing the old formula. And once it was out in the wild, you started to hear why.  And those reasons I’ve already alluded to. This was an attack on their history, and their traditions. This was an insult to hard-working Americans made to appeal to the yuppy city-dwellers who preferred Pepsi and namby-pamby diet soda. And I’m not making these ideas up. Some LITERAL QUOTES about it, courtesy of Mother Jones:

• Coke’s “catering to pantywaists” they said in New Jersey, complaining it wasn’t “macho” anymore.

• “Have a sweeter Coca-Cola with your green pasta, top it off with a frozen tofu cone, then put on a video and do your aerobics to a modem of synthesized quadri-sound.” – Mark Russell  (Though this may have been more of a riff than a rant: Mark Russell is a noted comedian who is STILL writing jokes about politics to this day.)

Seriously, I cackled at some of his jokes from the last couple months.

• Gay Mullins, the leader of the Old Cola Drinkers of America (the guy who actually couldn’t drink Coca Cola, who actually preferred New Coke in taste tests, and tried to blame that ON old Coke), said that this was an attack on “the very fabric of America” and proclaiming Coke’s actions were akin to the taxation without representation that motivated the Revolutionary War. He declared the (spoilers) failure of the product launch as Americans “winning back our heritage”.

• Some even hinted it might be a Communist plot (oh, hey, Communism’s back too!), pointing out that the current head of Coca Cola was a man who had fled Cuba during Castro’s rise. They suggested that this had been his long-term goal, moving to American decades earlier and climbing the ranks at Coca Cola just to…something something something. (Ruin Coke, and thus extinguish America’s spirit, I guess? )

All of these ideas probably sound very familiar to modern American readers. We’ve heard them A LOT over the last 10 years or so. Secret Foreigners destroying us from within! Our heritage is under attack! The Coastal Elites are making us less manly! Somehow, Coke tapped into the Conservative culture war arsenal DECADES before it would become mainstream. New Coke truly was innovating.

Meanwhile, during the 2019 protests, we were bringing BACK 80’s hair, so the pictures are very confusing.

Anyway, what Coke hadn’t anticipated was that,  it turned out that when someone stands up and yells “this soda is an insult to the memory of my grandfather”, everyone else in the room promptly decides they would much rather agree with that person than argue with them over mildly better soda. They KNEW there would be some hold-outs, but they didn’t anticipate how vocal they would be, and how many people would rather agree with the loud voices than get into arguments, leading to much wider backlash than anticipated and within months, Coke switched back. Some like to claim that Coke used the switch to change from Sugar to High Fructose Corn Syrup, or that this was a huge marketing thing. The former is wrong because Coke started doing that YEARS before the New Coke launch. The latter, well, my favorite quote about it comes from Coke themselves. Coke Executive Donald Keough: “Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say that we planned the whole thing. The truth is we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart.”

And that is…probably more than anyone needed to know about Coca Cola. Funnily enough, they brought New Coke back for the Stranger Things debut, and, since all the people pissed about defending their heritage had more important things going on, people got to try it and say “yeah, this is pretty good” without anyone going insane. (it certainly helped that it was part of a nostalgia limited-edition thing, instead of a “alright, this is the new world, adapt” situation.)

I need a drink.

Might we suggest a refreshing Coca Cola, here being sold to David Chang in Istanbul?
Looks like Coke did alright as an International company.

MONDAY: JON MAKES PUNS, EGGS, AND SANDWICHES, AS EGG WEEK BEGINS. WHICH HE NOW SLIGHTLY REGRETS, SINCE HE LEARNED THAT THE COST OF EGGS HAS TRIPLED. WHOOPS. LOOK, THIS ONE DOESN’T USE MANY, AND IT FEEDS SEVERAL PEOPLE. I’M HELPING YOU CONSERVE YOUR EGGS!

WEDNESDAY: I AM NOT HELPING YOU CONSERVE YOUR EGGS. JON MAKES 4 KINDS OF EGG SALAD BECAUSE HE CAN’T READ THE FUCKING ROOM.

FRIDAY: JON MAKES EGG ROLLS, BECAUSE OF COURSE ONE OF THE DISHES DURING EGG WEEEK WASN’T GOING TO ACTUALLY HAVE EGGS. HAVE YOU MET ME?