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Comment by troymc | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a chemist, but can't one just run Coca Cola through a mass spectrometer to determine the relative amounts of, say, the top 15 molecules (by their masses), then do some further sleuthing (e.g. X-ray diffraction studies of the component molecules) to determine what those 15 molecules are?

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Seems like this would be about as informative as looking at the assembly code for Firefox.

And if the browser industry were as big as the beverage industry, and if Firefox had the kind of advantage Coke has, I am sure people would be doing it.

You forgot at least one "and":

...and if Firefox weren't open source. Why look at disassembled asm when you can download the C/C++ code?

Come to think of it, I probably could have chosen a better example, as Firefox is open source...

Given the right amount of time looking at the assembly of firefox isn't an impossible way to find out what it is doing.

A good counter example is the assembly of old nes games. I have read through some of them and you can even find nice commented versions of the main games source like mario, mario3, super mario etc. Reading the source is really eye opening. Some features in the game are very hard coded and fundamental to the code base changing it would be extremely hard. Other times you find fantastically elegant code. If anyone is interested in a treat go read the level loading asm for smb1.

If they used pure isolated ingredients then yes. But they don't - they use plant extracts which contain hundreds if not thousands of molecules.

Problem is, recombining.

Since you're not just using raw chemicals to produce the final product reproducing it is very expensive if this is the way that you're going about it.

The ingredients aren't a secret - they are published by the people that certify stuff as kosher for example, or by equivalents of FDA in some countries.

Of course the proportions and mixing might be secret - but really it's coke's brand and ubiquity that is their 'secret'.

Exactly. My dad is a chemist and he mentioned this to me: it's not hard to 'reverse engineer' the formula. You can iterate until the results of the spectrometer from the original coke and your invented formula are close enough.

Good luck with trying to sell and distribute at competing prices with The Coca Cola company (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coca_Cola_Company#Lobbying)

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