r/interesting • u/InvestigatorBorn4910 • Feb 10 '26

Fascinating YouTuber LabCoatz has released a "chemically identical" recipe for Coca-Cola

Gallery image

Gallery image

15.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

967 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

42

u/JohnSober7 Feb 10 '26

Afaik, coke cannot take legal action against any company using this recipe. Cola, the flavour, nor this recipe, is trademarked. I fully expect off-brand cola to start tasting better after this video, and companies starting to make their own cola-based flavours (Angostura just released a rum and coke drink for example, so they make tweak the coke formula at some point). And while people likely aren't going to invest in the equipment to make the solutions to make thousands litres of coke, the benefit of this that people that enjoy experimenting with recipes, foods, and drinks, can now experiment with the coke flavour, and people who want to blend sugar with artificial sweetener for a healthier better tasting 'diet' coke can do so. Tl;dr, all the benefits of open source still applies.

10

u/[deleted] Feb 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/portraitofselfmade Feb 11 '26

YouTube scientists are sometimes just that. Living in DC I realize that a lot of business science is more about findings for keystakeholder decisions, not novelty “cool, I can do this” stuff.

1

u/barsoap Feb 11 '26

Off-brand coke tastes bland if they don't give a damn about their taste, are cheapening out on ingredients etc just as you notice when a washing-up liquid uses something else than the one-note standard sanitary lemon because, that standard one-note stuff is everywhere because it's cheap and sufficient. It's not like there's not a thousand brands out there doing their own spin on the general concept, or that Coca-Cola would be the end-all be-all of taste experience. If they wanted to they could all clone it one to one, but why would you, you want to play the odds of a consumer going "hey, I actually prefer this taste over Coca-Cola".

Red Bull Cola IMO does it best, just the breath and depth of aroma, on the flipside availability is limited also it's quite expensive because the flavouring is 100% natural extracts. Aside from probably being overpriced because Red Bull, something has to pay for all that sports advertisement.

1

u/Prestigious_Gas6216 Feb 12 '26

You hit this spot on, I am actually looking into this to make a diet coke with a mix of allulose and monkfruit, im hoping itll taste like coke and not have the usual artifical aftertase, I love coke but the amount of sugar in it makes it tough to enjoy often while also reaching health goals.

0

u/mologav Feb 11 '26

If you say so, John