YouTuber Cracks Coca-Cola’s 139-Year-Old Secret Formula—Here ‘s the Recipe
The post YouTuber Cracks Coca-Cola’s 139-Year-Old Secret Formula—Here ‘s the Recipe appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
In brief A YouTuber claims to have reverse-engineered Coca-Cola’s closely guarded recipe using mass spectrometry, taste testing and a year of trial-and-error, producing a near-identical clone. The analysis suggests more than 99% of Coke’s composition is sugar, caffeine and acid, with the long-mythologized “secret formula” accounting for less than 1% of the drink by weight. The findings undercut decades of brand mystique around Coca-Cola’s vault-guarded recipe, highlighting how modern lab tools can replicate proprietary flavors without infringing trademarks. Coca-Cola keeps its secret formula locked inside a 10-foot vault at the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, complete with a keypad and hand-print scanner. The company has spent 139 years cultivating the mystique, claiming only two employees know the full recipe at any given time. YouTuber LabCoatz just blew past all that theater with some special hardware and about a year of obsessive testing. The 25-minute video dropped January 9 and has already racked up 2.8 million views. In it, LabCoatz walks through his entire reverse-engineering process: taste tests, spreadsheets ranking each batch against real Coke, and finally, mass spectrometry courtesy of two YouTuber friends with actual lab equipment. The result? A clone so close that taste testers couldn’t reliably tell it apart from the real thing. One guy gave it 9.5 out of 10. Another said he’d buy it off store shelves. Here’s the thing that makes Coca-Cola’s whole secrecy theater kind of hilarious: over 99% of the drink’s composition is pure sugar. A liter contains about 110 grams of sugar, 96 milligrams of caffeine, 0.64 grams of phosphoric acid, and caramel color. That’s it. Now, the entire 139-year mystery, the vault with the hand scanner, the legend that only two employees know the formula at any time — all of that drama is about the “natural flavors” that…
Filed under: News - @ January 13, 2026 12:24 am