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Comment by jihadjihad | Hacker News Reader

Ingredients located at [0], full recipe at [1]. If true, it's interesting. I don't have these oils on hand but seemingly they wouldn't be too difficult to procure.

According to the This American Life episode [2] where they made a batch, the taste testers were able to detect real Coke 28 out of 30 times. So maybe it's not a perfect match! Still, it's cool.

0: https://github.com/cognitom/OpenCola/blob/master/recipe.mark...

1: https://cube-cola.org/index.php?route=information/informatio...

2: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/427/original-recipe

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I'd think that a cola recipe ought to at least have cola-nut extract, which this recipe does not.

"These days, the Coca-Cola recipe is a closely guarded secret. But it's said to no longer contain kola nut extract, relying instead on artificial imitations to achieve the flavour." [0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160922-the-nut-that-hel...

No artificial flavors are listed. So whether there is kola nut or not, there isn't any replacement that is artificial:

INGREDIENTS: CARBONATED WATER, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CARAMEL COLOR, PHOSPHORIC ACID, NATURAL FLAVORS, CAFFEINE.

https://us.coca-cola.com/products/coca-cola/original

This only means the flavours are derived from natural products like plants, bark, meat, milk, bone, etc. So not fully synthetic flavours (which are often from oil/gas), but still these will not be anything you would ever guess or recognise. Companies that use actual 'natural' flavours usually list them in the ingredientsas consumers take these as signals of the product being 'healthy' (e.g. fruit concentrates like apple concentrate or various citrus extracts, root extracts, leaf extracts, etc)

But "natural flavors" are the entirety of what Coca-Cola uses for flavoring, including real vanilla and cinnamon and all the rest. Whether it uses actual kola nut or not, there's no way of knowing.

Things like fruit concentrates can't be listed as natural flavors, because they're still the actual full fruit.

There exist e.g. "natural vanilla flavoring" that are not made from real vanilla.

I remember reading that there are biotech companies that basically engineer custom flavors for products like Coke and Doritos, flavor compounds that have a powerful impact and which no one else can get. Despite the engineered nature, they qualify for labeling as “natural flavors”.

Unless you can point to a source, that sounds exactly like all sorts of urban legends I grew up with...

(The most popular one was that KFC had started using initials for its name because its chicken had similarly been so "engineered" they weren't legally allowed to call it chicken... 100% false, of course.)

I believe Senomyx was one of the companies mentioned in whatever I read (it’s been a few years). Here are some documents they filed with the SEC describing their process and some of their clients, including Coca-Cola, who hired them “for the development and discovery of specified new flavors and flavor enhancers”.

There was apparently some flak because their technology used a human embryonic stem cell line in the flavor development process.

I’m not sure the link below will mention the qualification for “natural flavor” labeling, but I recall that flavors derived from yeast fermentation - even if the yeast are genetically engineered to produce specific compounds - qualify because fermentation is a “natural” process.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/vprr/0806/08061155.pdf

Kola nut is the original caffeine ingredient in original coke. They replaced thus long ago with coffee-extracted caffeine, so there is little reason to still use kola nuts.

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