ATLANTA - Coca-Cola keeps the recipe for its 127-year-old soda inside an imposing steel vault that’s bathed in red security lights. Several cameras monitor the area to make sure the fizzy formula stays a secret.
But in one of the many signs that the surveillance is as much about theater as reality, the images that pop up on video screens are of smiling tourists waving at themselves.
“It’s a little bit for show,” concedes a guard at the World of Coca-Cola museum in downtown Atlanta, where the vault is revealed at the end of an exhibit in a puff of smoke.
The ability to push a quaint narrative about a product’s origins and fuel a sense of nostalgia can help drive billions of dollars in sales. That’s invaluable at a time when food makers face greater competition from smaller players and cheaper supermarket store brands that appeal to thrifty Americans.
It’s why companies such as Coca-Cola and Twinkies’ owner play up the notion that their recipes are sacred, unchanging documents that need to be closely guarded. As it turns out, some recipes have changed over time, while others may not have. Either way, they all stick to the same script that their formulas have remained the same.
John Ruff, who formerly headed research & development at Kraft Foods, says companies often recalibrate ingredients for various reasons, including new regulations, fluctuations in commodity costs and other issues that affect mass food production.
“It’s almost this mythological thing, the secret formula,” says the president of the Institute of Food Technologists, which studies the science of food. “I would be amazed if formulas [for big brands] haven’t changed.”
This summer, the Twinkies cream-filled cakes many Americans grew up snacking on made a comeback after being off shelves for about nine months following the bankruptcy of Hostess Brands. At the time, the new owners promised the spongy yellow cakes would taste just like peopleremember.
A representative for Hostess, Hannah Arnold, says that Twinkies today are “remarkably close to the original recipe,” noting that the first three ingredients are still enriched flour, water and sugar.
Yet a box of Twinkies now lists more than 25 ingredients and has a shelf life of 45 days, almost three weeks longer than the 26 days from just a year ago. That suggests the ingredients have been tinkered with, to say the least, since they were created in 1930.
“When Twinkies first came out they were largelymade from fresh ingredients,” notes Steve Ettlinger, author of Twinkie, Deconstructed, which traced the roots of the cake’s many modern-day industrial ingredients.
For its part, KFC says it still strictly follows the recipe created in 1940 by its famously bearded founder, Colonel Harland Sanders. The chain understood the power of marketing early on, with Sanders originally bleaching his beard white to achieve a more grandfatherly look.
Fast forward to 2009, when KFC decided the security for the handwritten copy of the recipe needed a flashy upgrade. It installed a 770-pound safe that is under constant video and motiondetection surveillance and surrounded by two feet of concrete on every side - just in case any would-be thieves try to dig a tunnel toget it.
Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, the nation’s No. 1 and 2 soda makers, respectively, are known for touting the roots of their recipes.
PepsiCo celebrates its origins and in the past two years held its annual shareholders meeting in New Bern, N.C., where Caleb Bradham is said to have created the company’s flagship soda in the late 1890s. But the formula for Pepsi was changed to make it sweeter in 1931 by the company’s new owner, who didn’t like the taste.
Both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo say switches to highfructose corn syrup as a sweetener and reworked caramel sources do not alter the basic formulas or taste for their sodas. And they continue to hype up the enduring quality of their recipes.
This past spring, for example, Coca-Cola welcomed the widespread news coverage of a Georgia man who claimed to have found a copy of the soda’s formula and tried to sell it on eBay. The company saw the fanfare as evidence of the public’s fascination with its formula, and eagerly offered to make its corporate historian available for interviews to fuel the media attention.
The loyalty to that narrative is on full display at the World of Coca-Cola, where visitors mill about in a darkened exhibit devoted to myths surrounding the soda’s formula. Tabloid-style headlines are splashed across the walls and whispers play on a recorded loop:
“Even if you could see the formula, you wouldn’t understand it!” a voice says. “It’s the greatest mystery of all time!” says another.
Business, Pages 64 on 09/01/2013