One night I Was shopping, passed the soda, and a thought popped into my head: why not try to make my own soda? I have pure vanilla extract, cinnamon and sugar. So I bought a case of seltzer and spent the night making my own Dr Pepper and Coke. I caramelized sugar in a sauce pan for the Dr P which came out pretty good. Overall they were decent analogs but not anywhere near perfect. It was a fun itch to scratch.
We Germans drink Malzbier, which is equally unhealthy, but at least it tastes somewhat OK.
Coke itself is not consumed in a containerless 0g environment so the container itself imparts taste - hence why aficionados will often prefer glass over pastic or can. The bottling processing factory will also impart a taste, as will the local humidity which is why I often think drinks taste odd in Singapore.
My fav thing I heard was back in a chemistry lab someone told me a rumour coke had invested serious R&D into a plastic/surface that tastes like lemon to accommodate for the regular plastic taste that leaches from their bottles.
I actually had beer in mind for Singapore which I find somehow always tastes a bit off here...
This is 100% correct, I had to chuckle though when the thought of an actual living person considering themselves a "soda/coke afficionado" entered my mind.
I recall some years ago Pepsi making the claim they could replicate Coke to the point of it being essentially indistinguishable but that's wasn't the point, their branding required Pepsi to be clearly differentiated from Coke—commercially that seems to make sense.
It's unclear how accurate Pepsi's claims are but they seemed to be based on tasting trials where people couldn't tell the 'clone' from the real thing.
Seems to me Pepsi was likely right, if we consider how close this formulation is to Coke and that it was produced with limited resources then one would expect Pepsi with its huge resources to grind their 'clone' as fine as they deemed necessary.
These days, Coke's 'secret' formula is more a publicity stunt than anything else.
Thing is, since doing that taste comparison where I alternated sips several times between the two, I've consistently been able to tell if a drink was Pepsi or Coke. So while they are very very close, they are distinguishable to some people, if those people have trained their taste buds. (Or at least they were up to about 10 years ago, I don't know if they've changed the flavor in the past decade because I practically quit drinking soda at all once I got serious about maintaining a healthy weight.)
I don’t have trained taste buds, but something in Pepsi is off putting to me. Worse is artificial sweeteners, which I think I’m have whatever mutation makes aspartame taste bitter. I could never understand why people like Diet Coke, but it turns out I’m the strange one.
I remember being upset since he claimed I failed to even point out Dr Pepper, which I still think is unbelievable since even its smell is super distinctive and way different from a cola.
[1]: https://www.mitti.se/nyheter/buset-pa-kungsgatan--butiken-bl... is the same store, article (in Swedish) about a recent prank someone did there
Bottom line: the brain takes a lot of shortcut to allow us to take decisions quickly and is easily fooled. We aren't much better than a tiny LLM model really.
I did something similar with co-workers recently, who didn't believe there is a meaningful difference between brands. I blind-tasted 6 different glasses and got each one right. I got my favorite (Coke) right just by the first smell, I just had to taste to see whether it was diet or not.
Not that this is a skill or anything. Its just that each of the brands I tasted has a strong characteristic flavor to me, and the difference between real sugar and artificially sweetened is also stark. I've been drinking diet versions for ages precisely because the sugary ones are just too sweet for me.
Pepsi has more vanilla and lemon. If you go do a blind test now I bet you’ll find them easy to tell apart.
I reckon from experience that's correct. For example, I can't drink Pepsi Max as it's far too sweet (all I taste is sweetness, on its own that's not very appealing).
It probably didn’t take them terribly long to do it
Some people perhaps. Restaurants usually only carry one or the other so you don't get a choice.
With millions of dollars tied up in just a few percent of sales you can bet Pepsi knows just about as much as Coke does about Coke's ingredients (and vice versa of course).
The research for both companies is more about the fine minutiae—keeping an optimal differentiation between the two products more than treading on each other's territory. Trampling over each other for market share is done through advertising, not by making their products the same.
Most trade secrets aren't really all that secret.
It would be informative if we actually knew how much sugar was in say tbe wartime Coke of the 1940s compared with that of today. I reckon the difference would startle us.
Likely so, but there's some evidence it's different in different markets. That's why I made my reference point the 1940s. I first tasted Coke in the late 1950s in a market outside the US and it was definitely less sweet than it is nowadays.
Except for when it has. e.g.: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/coke-cuts-sweetness-in-cana...
Since around the 1970s food manufacturers have been increasing the sweetness of products to keep up with the population's shifting/increasing "bliss point". The "bliss point" is defined as the optimal sweetness of a product and it's been increasing over time from the constant bombardment of ultra refined food products. It seems we've adapted to the ready availability of readily available sweet stuff and now we need more to satisfy.
Decades ago, very sweet products weren't encountered to the same extent as today so the bliss point remained essentially static but in recent years as the average bliss point has increased manufacturers have increased the sweetness of products to compensate. There are many references to this, here's but one:
https://www.foodtimes.eu/consumers-and-health/bliss-effect-u...
Re Coke, when I was a kid, its sweetness depended to some extent on how it was obtained. Soda fountains before modern post mixing varied the radio of Coke syrup to soda which changed the perceived sweetness, also I believe in some countries the syrup came sans sugar (or largely so) to save on transport costs and was bottled (sugar ratios mixed) locally. This arrangement allowed local bottling to set the optimal bliss point for that market.
I remember kids whose parents owned a soda fountain could get the syrup and we'd mix it with soda to suit.
Incidentally, I'm in Australia and here the bottled Coke tastes different to what I've tasted in the US (could be sucrose versus fructose or sucrose/fructose mixtures as sucrose is usually the key sweetener used here).
More to the point, I've friends in New York and several of them have complained to me that they consider their local product not up to scratch and they prefer Coke that's bottled in Mexico whenever they can get it.
I cannot recall whether the Mexican Coke was sweeter or not, or if there was some other difference. Reason: whenever I ate with them they drank Coke whilst I stuck to beer.
Also where I am (Australia) it's always sucrose (unless fully imported) because of the large cane sugar industry in Queensland.
So there may be other nonvolatile compounds which nevertheless impact the flavour profile. While a lot of flavour is in your nose, not all of it is...
I'm pretty sure other types of mass spectrometers can though, correct?
Same with perfume knock-offs
Spectrometer doesn’t tell you quantities, mixes, what have you.
You can emulate 90% of the first smell but never in life you can replicate entire bouquet, aftersmell, propriety molecules, etc.
No doubt you're correct but it only takes one compound in trace amounts whose odor can be detected in parts per million to throw out a seemingly identical comparison done with spectroscopy.
Right, calibration is everything but sometimes that's damn hard to achieve. Also, here we're dealing with natural substances (at least some are like cola leaves). It's not hard to imagine there'd be thousands of organic molecules involved albeit most of them in minute amounts.
It just so happens that everything in beer that can go wrong and hurt you (any sooner than cancer) creates a distinct aftertaste and you can learn to avoid it rather easily.
The only exception of course is if you use poisonous ingredients in the first place.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1982/0...
I've done this blinded with colas, and it's pretty easy to tell the difference between Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Pepsi, and Diet Pepsi. You might not know which is which without some history drinking them, but they all taste very distinct by themselves.
Really disagree that these are indistinguishable parity products, or that most people would not be obviously able to tell the difference between them.
Not sure if its just me though but after drinking both diet coke and normal coke the taste gap between diet coke and normal coke felt really huge to me.
You mention about Dr pepper and how strikingly similar Dr Pepper zero is, what are some other drinks which have a genuinely similar.
But now realizing this, I think that there is a difference between diet, zero and normal variants, this is the first time I am discovering this. Time to drink coke zero and coke but the winters are really cold so I might have to wait this winter season
But yeah it's definitely not the same as classic Coke. Also gets rid of the coca extract, I think?
Although to be fair, the last time I had a diet coke, I was, dunno, maybe 10? So like 20 years ago at this point. So maybe if I had some now, I'd have a different opinion. But I don't think diet coke is even sold here in Brazil anymore, It's been years since I last saw one. I was actually not aware that it was still sold in the US!
Any of the Zero variants are worth a try, in my experience. Historically I choose Coke, and for quite a while I drank Coke Zero, which is pretty good. More recently in the last year or so I've fixated on Pepsi Zero, even though I've never really been a Pepsi fan otherwise. I also like Dr Pepper Zero, as I mentioned in my first post. I've never really liked any of the diet versions of soda, they just tasted too different to me.
1. I only drank non-diet sodas. Pepsi was my favorite, Dr Pepper or root beer was the runner up at restaurants the had Coke (which I hate) rather than Pepsi.
2. At some point I started trying to reduce the percent of my calories that came from carbs. I was able to continue drinking non-diet soda and meet my goal but only because (1) I usually only drank a small glass with each meal, and (2) I was able to reduce carbs from other things enough to leave room for the soda.
3. That reducing from other things enough to leave room for the soda got annoying, so I made myself drink diet sodas for a few days. I quickly got used to Diet Dr Pepper and started to enjoy it. Diet Pepsi became OK, but Diet Dr Pepper was better. Once this switch was made and I didn't need to make room for soda carbs I could stick to my carb goal pretty easily.
4. After a few years of that, I had oral surgery. They advised me to not drink carbonated beverages for a week or so afterwards, so I drank water. I was actually fine with that so after two weeks I finished off the 2L bottles of Diet Dr Pepper in my fridge and then just drank water at home for the next few years. I would still have a Diet Dr Pepper or a Diet Pepsi or Pepsi Zero or Diet root beer on the few occasions I ate out.
If I ate out at a place that did not those I would sometimes get a non-diet Dr Pepper or Pepsi and it was terrible. It seemed too sweet. It tasted like someone had mixed some thick sweetener into it so not only was the flavor off the feel of the drink was wrong.
It was bad enough that I would no longer eat out at those places. I'd only get food to go from there.
So now I'm really curious if Dr Pepper Zero will taste good to me or not. If my problem with regular Dr Pepper is just due to the sugar I should probably be OK with Dr Pepper Zero. But if what I really now dislike is non-diet Dr Pepper's flavor it sounds like I'll also dislike Dr Pepper Zero.
That's more likely the phosphoric acid softening them.
It's an odd combination, I think colas are the only instance where a mineral acid is used synergistically with another ingredient to enhance flavor.
Someone with greater knowledge may wish to expand on this.
Throwing together sugar, acid, and carbonation does not overwhelm your sense of taste. Thats most bottled beverages. If you believe this, you should see a doctor.
But many beverages are very similar to other beverages. It’s not an inherent flaw in taste perception that Coke and Pepsi taste alike to most people, it’s that one was intentionally made to be only slightly different than the other.
Coke and Pepsi are a lot closer but still distinguishable.
So you can taste it, but that doesn't matter in the end.
Sure the majority of people cannot tell flavor notes apart but there exists a certain % of the population that can very reliably distinguish different tastes. Wine sommeliers, fine dining, food science are all professions which require a sensitive palate and smell and it is an over simplification to talk about sodas tasting the same for the majority of people as if it implies there is no difference or speciality in crafting taste.
If you're a fan of Dr.Pepper, you'll notice they have 2 different bottles based on where you buy. That's because in some regions, Dr.Pepper uses Pepsi for bottling and in others it uses Coke bottlers.
TLDR: carbonic acid breaks down sucrose to glucose/fructose anyway
Coke used to be mixed, bottled, and shipped out in an extremely quick timeframe. Inventory turned over fast.
I suspect the separated components wind up being equal to what a stale soda has, one that has been on the shelf. It’s like buying a soda whose sugar component has already gone stale.
Sure, the rest of the flavors are there and still fresh, unaffected by the carbonated water, but the sweetness one is off.
The taste of local water should be irrelevant.
Most stores carrying products made in Mexico have it.
2) As it turns out, a cane sugar (sucrose) base for a dilute acidic liquid will very quickly assume an equilibrium ratio of intact sucrose to sucrose that's been cleaved in half into glucose & fructose, dictated by molecular interactions. Testing these drinks will always find a good amount of fructose.
I’m not sure if the flavor has changed much in the past 30 years, but I do know that a McDonald’s Coke is almost always good.
Coke, Guinness, etc all probably have exquisite quality control. Is it in the manual of any equipment, “congratulations on your new FooBar pH meter. To confirm the correct operation, a CokeCola should give a reading of X”
one that gets mentioned occasionally on the internet is the peanut butter: https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2387
Which version ? In EU it tastes different in almost every country.
I'm old enough to remember when that was actually the big size.
It was a rite of passage to have your parents let you get one for the first time.
https://www.youtube.com/@MassSpecEverything
is a great resource. He breaks down lots of the things you might be interested in.
The book also covers how they scout out real estate, and how they create french fries by shooting potatoes at 80 mph. (A bit different from in-n-out)
Note: don't bother watching the movie, it's nothing like the book.
It would also be very interesting if he could get his hands on coke from different markets as the formulation varies from country to country. One of the most obvious is the amount of cinnamon, but it would be very interesting to know if more differences were there.
Another interrogation of mine would be if, sugar aside, the formula is different between regular coke and coke zero. I'd bet is is, simply to offset the aftertaste that aspartam/artificial sweeteners have, but I'm curious if other non-sweetness related ingredients do change.
Haven't done a side-by-side comparison, though, so maybe it's just my memory of my childhood tastebuds.
Children have a much more sweet tooth than adults, so it may be the reason you did not notice it, as it would not necessarily register as bothersome. I liked to bite into direct sugar cubes as a kid, which I would definitely not stand today.
Georgia passed prohibition and coca-cola was an invention to replace the now banned beverages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose/fructose/phosphoric_ac...
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/pickyourpoison/exhibition...
the original chemist who made Coca Cola was a genius
The original formula contained coca leaves (the raw material for cocaine) and extract from kola seeds (that's where the name comes from).
Beverages containing cocaine were very common until the beginning of the century (search for "Vin Mariani"). Even today you can buy coca leaves in the supermarkets of some Latin American countries (Bolivia, Peru, etc).
An huge corporation using the raw material of cocaine to produce the most popular soda in the world would be the funniest story of our times.
Coca Cola does still use coca leaves for its flavor:
"In a telephone interview from Coca-Cola's Atlanta headquarters, Randy Donaldson, a company spokesman, said, ''Ingredients from the coca leaf are used, but there is no cocaine in it and it is all tightly overseen by regulatory authorities.''"
...
"Bales of coca destined for Stepan and, ultimately, for Coca-Cola are shipped to the Maywood plant through ports in New York and New Jersey, Mr. O'Brien said. Each shipment carries its own import permit, also issued by the D.E.A."
* https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/01/business/how-coca-cola-ob...
Just a lot of sugar
Wait 'til you find out what water can do.
I do get your point, but really, it's just corrosive in a different way than the usual highly corrosive stuff we consume daily.
That's just acidic, orange juice will do the same thing. But perhaps you are amazed people are willing to consume orange juice too!
Chemistry is scary to those who don’t understand it because it gets used for this type of sophistry.
Also I'm not sure how the pH level of a food is relevant to anything
Sour is one of the main "flavors"
The non-nutritive sweeteners in their pure form are wild too. They are 2 + orders of magnitude sweeter than sugar and they come in very fine powders. You have to mask up when you work with them if you don’t want to taste vague sweetness for awhile.
What makes this video revolutionary is he was able to find an alternative to the coca leaf that has a near identical flavor. If it's as good tasting as advertised this knowledge could empower 3rd party producers to make a coke drink that will finally rival Coca-Cola in popularity.
* Importing coca-cola extract with coca extract is legal
* Coca Cola is significantly more popular than Pepsi in Australia
I think sooner or later, everyone who drinks a lot of soda will try the store brand as well as other colas that are non-belligerents in the cola wars. Some of them are ok, some are good for some mixed drinks, some are so bad I won't even finish the pack. Even though I prefer Pepsi, if I knew brand X was pretty close to Coke, I might choose it when it costs less and money is tight.
This will bring down marketshare significantly. It's incredibly hassle, which is likely the point. I am looking for good and cheap sodastream cola syrup, but they are very expensive.
approximately 0.2 g per liter
I am not even much of a coca cola person. Usually I drink Pepsi or mountain dew but this video is one of the most high efforts video I have ever watched. Period.
massive respects to LabCoatz. I seriously didn't expect this level of quality, its shocking how good youtube is. This feels so professional and well thought of in a way
I am still in high school and I was studying chemistry. I don't enjoy chemistry (In fact I complain often so much about being forced to study chem to go to a decent CS uni that even AI LLM's wrapped of 2025 picked it up on my admittedly hate on chemistry https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/Imustaskforhelp)
I think that the chemistry (atleast what I study) is fundamentally different from the science shown here. This is the chemistry which genuinely attracted me. Studying biomolecules and seeing the structures some of them were even familiar.
I don't know but in a sense it kind of helps an genuine interest in the subject while being genuinely practical so I thank this video creator.
Some videos are just gems, this is one of them. I was constantly thinking surely Coke is so large of a company, everyone's heard of the secret, surely someone else must have made something so effective ( I was thinking of a large company) but it turns out that large companies dont really end up doing this and its the one man shop with genuine passion to his craft (in this chemistry) which really ends up doing spectacular.
Massive respects. Can't recommend it enough right now.
Also I am thinking of one thing but what if an non profit can be established who can produce such bottles of "lab cola" perhaps at a low-mid --> high scale.
I'd genuinely support and imagine that you can buy lab cola which can be environmentally safe and the proceeds go to social causes which you can align to. Wouldn't that just be amazing?
This opens up so much more possibilities!!
Edit: I thought about the non profit idea even more and I think that this can position itself as for fundraising as well. Imagine this genuine movement of slowly owning what we actually eat no more secret recipes. This seems to be the open source of Food and I am all for it!
If one worries about the supply chain, they can supply it via amazon or local providers (yes I know Amazon is morally shitty at times but I feel like this might answer some questions that people might have about that coca cola has worldwide presence, how is it gonna compete)
One could also bootstrap the whole thing and directly sell to customers or businesses as well (the businesses can have genuine value to it, I don't think that at scale, there is much of a difference in pricing and some amount of pricing gains are okay for what its worth if the mission is noble)
Best part is that Coca Cola can do nothing about all of it and the ideas are limitless, the bottleneck was the recipe which has now been effectively reverse engineered haha. There is a genuine ability for people to bring change in beverage industry. I am certainly hyped for what its worth. Someone please contact LabCoatz if you have affiliates and give him this idea if possible or anyone implement it themselves if they follow a similar field/expertise to this. If so, I would be your first customer for the non profit :)
But cheers for showing support to high quality science content on YT. Appreciation is a great instinct to nurture.
unfortunately thast long after i might have learned how to do that problem solving. maybe if i go back to school ill try to find such classes. i imagine biochem also has a lot of that
I could probably blame some parts of the education system but I don't think that the system can probably change regarding it. Still, I just wanted to share my frustrations regarding it where everything kind of becomes overcompetitive while you have a hobby in computers and I feel like genuine passion towards computing/linux and other things and want to make it a job because in my case I feel like money's valuable only in the end to do something that I enjoy and in this case, I can get both paid and enjoy without having to go through a retirement phase (or so my thoughts on FIRE, I'd still invest/save most of the money as money is rather not the big part of why I am doing this in my opinion) and Chem doesn't have anything related to it for what its worth.
I still have to go read chemistry though. But I don't know why but something in this video genuinely clicked chemistry for me where I could watch a 100 videos like this (although the point can be that I am now doing it out of my own free will and not a rigorous syllabus with tests and rewards/punishments systems basically)
Sorry for the yap, just wanted to get it off my chest. I have nothing against chem as a subject tho, I am sure that its interesting and this video sorts of proves it but I feel like I am more inclined towards software engineering but it sucks that I have to study chem to go do what I actually want in life (which requires a degree for maximal benefit which requires good marks aka a decent/huge focus on chem as well right now)
> But cheers for showing support to high quality science content on YT. Appreciation is a great instinct to nurture.
Thanks! I appreciate it, Have a nice day!
(Also edit once again) but I want to touch on the reason why I feel appreciating it even more so is because a single guy is able to compete against (essentially) a 200 Billion $ GIANT.
Such levels of individual freedom and achievements should be celebrated by the society just for the sake of it (and in this case we can see some other benefits as well as I told in the initial comment)
They empower Individual youth and Individuals in general and its very empowering. Generally the same reason I love Open source as well. Bringing real change to the world and leaving a fingerprint on Humanity I suppose. Even small things like these provide me and maybe others hope against darkness created by system of corruption being witnessed most around the world and monopolization/ big businesses doing shady practices most often.
That being said: The thing about soda that most people get wrong is the level of fizz. Nothing is comparable to commercial soda just based off that. So, when you start off from a lower level baseline of "your fizz" < "their fizz", and add in recipe differences...well, it'll be a fun watch, regardless.
Small edit on this: They used a soda stream, which definitely doesn't add as much carbonation as commercial equipment does. Based only upon that, the taste profile will end up different for most, and despite all the science involved, it will lead to the over use of other flavors to compensate. Respectable try, however. He should sell premixed stuff on his website, although I imagine that is a regulatory nightmare, given that some of the stuff he used isn't food grade.
There's a lot of things that aren't great for you at one quantity but are better or necessary at another.
As they say, the most dangerous thing in the ocean is the water.
