The Coca-Cola Company for details

 Coca Cola

Coca-Cola (English: Coca-Cola) is the name of the cola manufactured and sold by The Coca-Cola Company. Nickname is Coke.

Outline

Coca-Cola Inventor John Pemberton

The world's first cola beverage, invented in the United States in 1886, originated in Atlanta, Georgia. The headquarters is still in Atlanta, and many tourists visit the "World of Coca-Cola Museum" there.

The origin of the name Coca-Cola is that it used coca leaves (including cocaine as an ingredient) and cola nuts (mostly from Africa at that time) as raw materials . Since 1903 , it has no cocaine component and is now free of cola nuts.

Coca-Cola Japan Co., Ltd. has completely denied this explanation, claiming that the name comes from a simple reason, "because it has a good sense of language."

Named by Frank Robinson, a friend of Dr. John Pemberton and in charge of accounting. However, neither is the main component of the current Coca-Cola, and the cola fruit, like other cola drinks, is a trace amount that has little effect on the flavor. 

History

See "The Coca-Cola Company" for details.

Manufacture of Coca-Cola

The undiluted solution of Coca-Cola prepared at the headquarters of The Coca-Cola Company in the United States is distributed to bottling companies around the world , diluted with corn syrup, sugar, etc. by local companies, and further divided with carbonated water. It is bottled, canned and sold.

Material

The flavor of Coca-Cola is said to be due to the combination of top secret fragrance 7x and citrus and spice flavors 7-8. Of these, the 7x component is Coca-Cola's top secret, and only top executives know the component.

7x is said to be lemon, orange, nutmeg, cinnamon, neroli, coriander, and 7 types of decocaine-treated coca leaves (or 6 types without coca leaves) extracted with alcohol. This 7x and other flavor combination recipe is called "formula" (see below).

Recipe (formula)

The Coca-Cola formula is private, and documents about the formula have been kept in the vault of a bank in Atlanta as collateral for loans since 1919. After that, the formula was changed only once by the New Coke in 1985, but it is said that it has not changed since it was restored in 3 months by protest (excluding the amount of cocaine and caffeine).

For this reason, information of unknown truth about its components and contents is often distributed, and it became the source of cokelore described later. A product called OpenCola was created based on this formula, but it still could not completely reproduce the taste and aroma of Coca-Cola.

In February 2011, the American radio show This American Life announced that it had discovered a proportion of Coca-Cola's top-secret fragrance "7x." An article dated February 8, 1979 by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the local newspaper of The Coca-Cola Company, discovered by the producer of the show, includes a recipe handwritten by Coca-Cola inventor John Pemberton. It was accompanied by a picture of it.  The recipe that can be read from the photo is as follows.

Caramel color manufacturing method adjustment

In March 2012, 4-methylimidazole contained in caramel color was added to the list of carcinogens under California law as an upper limit of 29 micrograms / day, while 355 ml cans for cola drinks 1 The book was found to contain more than 100 micrograms and the recipe was modified to avoid displaying risk warnings. The American Beverage Association issues a statement that "4-methylimidazole" is not on the US Food and Drug Administration's list of human carcinogens.  A World Health Organization (+ G) study reports that there is a risk of cancer.

About the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle

Coca-Cola's unique "necked" bottle (Contour bottle) is said to have been designed with reference to the female body line or the skirts that were popular at the time, but this story is not true. Absent.

 It was a complicated shape as a countermeasure against similar products. This is because it was made into a bottle. At that time, it was designed with inspiration from the illustrations of cacao beans in the encyclopedia.

The third-generation (1970s) model of the Chevrolet Corvette, one of the American sports cars, was nicknamed the Cork Bottle because the boldly inflated front and rear fenders and the central part of the body that looked like a constriction were reminiscent of a cola bottle. is there.

In addition, the racing car of the car race F1 is also called a cork bottle because the shape of the body around the rear wheel is narrowed down to remind us of a cola bottle in order to reduce air resistance. When adopted by racing car designer John Barnard in the 1983 McLaren MP4 / 1C, its shape was quickly imitated by other teams, and in modern times all F1 cars (and most formula cars) are cork bottles. The shape.

By the way, the design of Virgin Cola's PET bottle is made to imitate the body line of actress Pamela Anderson.

About the taste of Coca-Cola

 Before the spread of PET bottles, there was an urban legend that a bottle with a square engraving was "dry" with strong carbonation, and a bottle with a round engraving was "sweet" with weak carbonation.

In reality, only different markings were made for each bottle manufacturing plant, and since Coca-Cola was a returnable bottle, bottles with different markings were mixed and shipped during the collection and reuse process by the bottler. there were. This engraving was used to regulate the direction of the logotype printed on the surface of the bottle so that the printed part would not cover the parting line formed by mold molding. This is because there was a difference that the round type and the square type were easier to fix depending on the factory equipment of the bottle manufacturer. In Japan, the round type is made of Ishizuka Glass and the square type is made of Nihon Yamamura Glass.