A plot to steal the secret Coke can-liner formula
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Yet the flavourings are the ones that will be organic molecules in tiny concentrations, not affecting the design of processing plants, yet very important for anyone wanting to copy the flavor.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4687882
They even created a one season podcast read by the fictional author, Leslie G Claret, who's played by the actor Kurtwood Smith.
Does your pal really work as a chemical engineer ;)
Love this show! Cleverly written and incredibly underrated.
> [At her new job,] she would make $157,000 a year, a slight bump over her Coke salary, with a $15,000 signing bonus.
She was a 50 year old chemist with a lot of expertise, and she was making less than an entry level SWE.
Also, her deal with the Chinese company is described as
> codifying her 33.5% stake and entitling her to a salary of 600,000 yuan per year.
Which is like $85k. (A 33% stake in something that could be big is significant though.)
Still, it all seems like a lot of risk for not a ton of money.
It reminds me of political bribery scandals. You hear how much some politician was paid, and you're like -- "that's it? That's all it costs?"
2. I guess she aspired to be yet another Chinese analogue of Samuel Slater (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater). But it doesn't sound like she was on track to accomplish nearly so much, even if she'd succeeded. Slater had an empire by the end.
3. This just reinforces my impression that the stuff they use in food packaging must be horrendous.
Yep, chemistry pays pretty terribly. Its part of why after finishing my BSc (Chem/Maths) I went into software dev instead, despite really enjoying it
I have always believe that this the reason why coke from a plastic bottle tastes different that one from a metal can or glass bottle. Personally I try to stay clear of the plastic bottle as I find that can/glass taste better.
Aluminum in general is great at blocking most gases, but especially oxygen.
So basically, Coca-Cola is kind of orthogonal to Colombian drug cartels.
>So basically, Coca-Cola is kind of orthogonal to Colombian drug cartels.
This comment is baffling. The first paragraph implies that coca-cola is somehow acting like a drug cartel because their products contain coca extract, but the second paragraph does a 180 and claims that it's "orthogonal" (ie. independent or irrelevant) to drug cartels.
They base their business off of the same plant as the drug cartels. They operate independently, and Coca-Cola isn't really going to do anything about the cartels. Or care what they do to coca farmers as long as they also get the part of the plant they care about. And since they don't need the cocaine, it's quite possible that Coca-Cola is made with the by-products of the cocaine extraction process.
Technically, we could have one without the other. Because each needs a part that the other does not. And I'm sure as long as it's cheap enough, Coca-Cola isn't going to question too hard about where its extract is source from.
And to be fair, Coca-Cola isn't above hiring paramilitaries to keep people in line.
Coke is cheaper than bottled water because of the aggressive subsidies they've pursued. The reason that poverty is correlated with obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and dementia (among others) is not politically neutral or ethically innocent. It's a byproduct of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible.
Sure, you're right, the board of coca cola did not put a gun to my head and force me to do a kegger with their sodas. They "only" spent more than the discretionary budgets of some nation states to get kids "craving" (read: addicted to) high fructose corn syrup.
Speaking of guns and forcing people though, are we going to talk about how the company funds paramilitary forces in countries such as Columbia where they kill union activists? I guess those people are foreigners so they don't really enter the calculus. There's nothing more quintessentially American than funding death squads in Latin America I suppose. https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/
Watching people defend multinationals that would turn them into Soylent Green for 0.01% higher quarter-quarter growth is tragic.
Source? Last time I looked into it[1], the claim didn't hold up to scrutiny.
>Speaking of guns and forcing people though, are we going to talk about how the company funds paramilitary forces in countries such as Columbia where they kill union activists? I guess those people are foreigners so they don't really enter the calculus. There's nothing more quintessentially American than funding death squads in Latin America I suppose. https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/
I skimmed the article and couldn't find anything that supports the claim that "the company funds paramilitary forces". It mentions there's a lawsuit that claims coca-cola was "complicit" (which by the way, ended up being dismissed[2]), and outlines violence against labor organizers by the paramilitaries, but stops short of claiming they were funded by the company.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36841407
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.
Typically victims of crime didn't choose to be harmed out of their own free will. A murder victim didn't consent to be killed. In that case I'm not sure how "free will" applies. People suffering from the negative effects of coke however, did consume it out of their free will.
That is exactly my point. The implication in many comments is that the crime is ok because "coca cola bad" - it's not.
So I guess that the question is how much time successfully selling the secret would have gotten her.
It seems easy enough for me to understand not to steal from anyone.
I guess society disagrees, and honestly this like many comments here seem to have an anti-corporate agenda behind them that is truly irrelevant to the facts at hand.
The patent system exists to incentivize sharing information through a limited time monopoly. Giving trade secrets an unlimited time monopoly protection by criminalizing someone sharing them undermines that, and means that patents will only be used for low-value ideas that are obvious/easy to independently reinvent or reverse engineer.
Do you think IP should come before human health?
Should we legislate everything that might be unhealthy? There are plenty of nanny states who will do that for you, I don't live in one.
If I want to be sure, I'll grow and make it myself. Relying on someone else to tell you always ends the same way, nanny or not. Science still can't agree on aspertame.
Soda cans have a mm thin coating that I already knew about. But my big takeaway from this article:
That coating is non-trivial to get right and, if gotten wrong, will react with the beverage inside the can.
It’s surprising to me that regulators allow this to be kept a trade secret. I understand using patents to give them a monopoly. But knowing what I know now, after reading that article, I don’t trust a drink coming from these cans. There’s no way for consumers to review the product for safety.
I always assumed these containers were able to be audited by consumer watch groups and advocacy groups.
The FDA protects trade secrets and more broadly "any commercially valuable plan, formula, or device". Just because something is a trade secret doesn't mean you don't have to tell the FDA about it.
That said, it's not like you really have to prove something is safe before adding it to food.
> There’s no way for consumers to review the product for safety.
Disagree. Or rather, knowing what the coating is does not make you any safer. What it should be is very different from what it actually is and what is inadvertently included with it. 3rd party analysis is the only thing that actually tells you what is in something.
It is useful to have public listings of things for people who want to categorically avoid BPA or MSG or whatever, but that's really a different issue from safety. If it crosses over into a real safety concern, like a nut allergy, trade secrets are overridden. I (personally) don't think it's good to say that any safety concern (in this case, a hypothetical one!) can override trade secrets. I don't think it's unreasonable to disagree with that though.
Good old analog loophole to DLP (and copyright protection [except when it comes to duplicating dollar bills]).
> All that complexity lends the industry a deep resistance to change. But You arrived at Coke at a rare moment of disruption, caused by concerns about a ubiquitous liner ingredient called bisphenol A, or BPA. A growing, if not unanimous, body of research has suggested that BPA can interfere with the body’s endocrine system, increasing the risk of a host of health problems including Type 2 diabetes and accelerated puberty. In 2010, France banned BPA in baby bottles, later expanding the ban to include any food packaging sold in the country.
If it doesn't react with the beverage... what's the issue supposed to be?
BPA doesn't react with the beverage, but it does dissolve in it in small quantities, and although it's not acutely toxic it has biological effects even in small quantities as it (imperfectly) mimics estrogen.
> "at the turn of the 20th century, the average age for an American girl to get her period was 16 or 17. Today, that number has decreased to 12 or 13 years." -- Hector O. Chapa, MD, FACOG, clinical assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Texas A&M College of Medicine
As a government, I would be really worried about such a change in my population, especially if I didn't understand the exact cause. Previously the age of marriage was mostly based on this puberty age - if societal norms change and 12 year olds start having babies, that will be a huge impact on the economic outlook of the country.
Parallel answers seem to state that dissolving is not a reaction, which seems weird to me, but OK.
I see that that is the standard terminology (which I was not previously aware of), but setting the terminology this way makes about as much sense to me as saying that there is no difference, as far as the chemistry is concerned, between a measure of distilled water and a measure of strong acid.
I'm not sure why that's not considered "chemistry".
chemical reaction: process that involves rearrangement of the molecular or ionic structure of a substance, as distinct from a change in physical form or a nuclear reaction.
So, a chemical reaction is not just what you would colloquially describe as a reaction of something that belongs to the realm of chemistry, it has a specific definition. A reaction is H + O2 = H2O (omitting concerns of stoichiometry for simplicities sake). A reaction is not e.g. salt dissolving in water, because salt stays salt (NaCl) and water stays water (H2O)
This is something I wonder about. How separate are the salt ions when salt dissolves in water? If you add a chunk of sodium to water it will explode; that doesn't happen when you add salt.
How is the American court getting access to messages sent from one Chinese person in China to another Chinese person in China?
Chinese apps tend to not encrypt anything stored on device, and while android itself supports full device encryption it tends to be disabled on China models, or if it is enabled it is just the users 4 digit pin that protects the key, with no secure processor to prevent just trying every pin.
You would think a huge company like this would’t run the risk of laying off one of these people.
The headline is a bit sensationalised and the lining formula isn't actually Coca-Cola's "secret formula", it's just a coating company's formula (Akzo Nobel N.V if I understand correctly, but she tried with multiple other suppliers).
That's why I found it weird at first, so many companies produce aluminium cans and beverages for aluminium cans that Coca-Cola itself couldn't have been the one holder of some special secret coating formula. But the importance of Coca-Cola did help her get leverage to obtain the coating formula from Akzo Nobel.
Whether they were worried themselves or not is not what made them change, French law (then followed by the rest of the EU, California and China) was the reason.
It's similar with banknotes. The materials used is public knowledge (and parts of it patented), but manufacturing is a secret to avoid counterfeiting.
If you don't have a list of all the input raw materials, intermediates, by-products, impurities, surface materials that can leech into the final product, etc; you can't test for them.
As far as I know the only European company that is allowed to do that. And I swear that drink does still contain some alkaloid magic, even thought there obviously is no cocaine in it.
But I guess if you cant show story with kids blown to pieces or similar level of abhorrent immediate effect its all a-OK.
coke's so bad for kids. give them juice or milk instead.
We also don't randomly poison ourself with alcohol and blame the drink Industrie.
Juice is nutritionally out of fashion now.