Translated from the original Spanish article. Read in Spanish
The most famous drink on the planet… was born in a pharmacy.
Five cents a glass
Atlanta, United States, 1886. The pharmacist John Pemberton creates a syrup and takes it to a pharmacy. There they mix it with carbonated water and sell it for five cents a glass.
The first year? About nine glasses a day.
His bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, comes up with the name and writes it by hand in the cursive script we still recognize today.
The inventor who never saw the success
Pemberton never saw the success: he sold his share shortly before he died. Asa Candler took over everything for about 2,300 dollars.
In 1894, a candy maker bottled it for the first time. Until then, you could only drink it at a pharmacy counter.
Asa Candler took over the company for about 2,300 dollars.
The world's best-kept recipe
The recipe spent 86 years locked in a bank vault.
In 2011, a radio show claimed to have it. It came from a 1979 Atlanta newspaper: a photo of a handwritten notebook. Coca-Cola replied that it wasn't the real one.
That same year, the formula left the bank and moved to a new vault, inside the brand's museum in Atlanta. It has a keypad and a hand scanner… but visitors can only see the door, never the paper.
Two people who never fly together
The company says only two people know how to prepare the secret ingredient, and that they never travel together on the same plane. Its code name: Merchandise 7X.
Today the company serves about 2.2 billion drinks a day. Not bad for something that started out selling nine glasses.
This story is also a video
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Watch the video on YouTubeWhat do you think: was the secret formula discovered years ago… and Coca-Cola just denies it?
Tell us in the comments on the video.
Sources (in Spanish)
- Historia de la bebida, John Pemberton y Asa Candler: Wikipedia, Coca-Cola y John Pemberton.
- La fórmula secreta, la bóveda del museo y la supuesta receta de 2011: Wikipedia, Fórmula de Coca-Cola.
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