Perfect meaning tasters would be initially fooled, but would correct themselves and note that the tastes were slightly different in A/B testing. The formula wasn't cracked it was emulated to a high degree of accuracy.
Yes - not about coke but my understanding is that Heinz invested a lot of money over the years to standardise the taste across factories, countries and tomatoes themselves.
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.
Interesting! According to [1] it's labelled as "less sugar" though, so it's not as if the original/standard Coke is different. There seems to be some widespread thinking that Singapore has issues with sugar consumption so I guess this is Coke's response (or perhaps they were forced by authorities).
> 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.
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.
That's my experience but I'm not much of a Coke drinker.
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.
Some 30 years ago, someone challenged me to tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke in a blind taste test. After taking several sips, I could eventually tell that one tasted just a little bit sweeter, more sugary, and the other one tasted just a tiny bit more... "dark" is how I put it at the time. (Note that I was using that word to describe a flavor, not a color. I do not have synesthesia, that's just the best word I could find to describe the subtle taste difference). I guessed that the slightly-sweeter one was Pepsi, and I turned out to be right.
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.)
The difference between the two is not that subtle. If I order a Coke at a restaurant and they bring out a Pepsi, I can tell immediate and usually send it back for something else.
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.
True story: I was once (late 90s, I think) made part of an impromptu taste-test in a 7 Eleven store in Stockholm [1], when a (probably bored) employee grabbed a Coke, a Pepsi and a Dr Pepper and some espresso-size paper cups and made me and some friends close our eyes and try to guess which was which.
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.
In switzerland they once did the test on a TV show making people taste beverage of various colors. Most people would say it has the taste of a fruit of the same color while all the beverages had the same mint flavor.
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.
> Some 30 years ago, someone challenged me to tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke in a blind taste test.
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.
There's a story (true AFAIK, but it's the kind of thing I can easily imagine having been debunked) of Pepsi winning in direct taste-test comparisons against Coca Cola, but only when the test was done with small quantities. Apparently the sweeter taste is initially more appealing, but the slightly less sweet taste holds up better over the course of a whole drink.
"...but the slightly less sweet taste holds up better over the course of a whole drink."
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).
I think it's obvious that a corporation the size of Pepsi could replicate the taste of coke if they wanted to. But why would they - their customers buy pepsi because they want pepsi, not because they are looking for cheaper coke - pepsi is not even cheaper, it's just a different product. Just like 7up tastes different to Sprite.
More interesting, to me, is why the corporations that produce house-brand colas don't do this. While not exactly Pepsico, these producers have plenty of financial resources, plus the motivation to get their product as close to Coca-Cola and Pepsi as possible.
TBF, I think some of them do - Aldi's Cola is like....95% there. I wonder if that last 5% is a concious choice, or an actual technical challenge in replicating the exact taste.
This seems completely believable to me. They have tons of research scientists and chemists who do this for a living, and had access to the best equipment (even back in the day).
It probably didn’t take them terribly long to do it
Pepsi can probably afford to run Coca Cola through a mass spec to get an idea of concentrations and even get the processed coca leaf used by Coca Cola (there’s one company in the uS with a license from the DEA).
Pepsi probably already have done this and likely Coke have done the same to Pepsi. However, Pepsi did also see what happened with New Coke and likely don’t wish to repeat that footgun of changing the formula. Plus people buy Pepsi because they want Pepsi not Coca-Cola
But the difference is Pepsi would also have had dedicated laboratories and food scientists, scientifically controlled exhaustive testing and unlimited access to any ingredient they wanted. Thus one would expect Pepsi's testing to have had much finer granularity than in this YouTube video).
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.
Pepsi probably also has had access to Coke's supply chain and long ago acquired samples of various inputs before mixing, which would make analysis easier. The two companies know they're competing mostly on production management and brand image, not secret ingredients. A decade or so ago a secretary from Coke tried to sell some of the company's "secrets" to Pepsi. Instead of jumping on the opportunity to get Coke's secrets, they contacted Coke's legal department and the FBI, with the three working together to prosecute her.
Yes my observation too that coca cola is inconsistent. I have felt that too. Also glass bottled cold drink or canned cold drinks taste much better than plastic bottled ones. My favorite is glass bottled one. But have never found a glass bottled coca cola in my region. It's a distribution issue.
So I also don't agree with claims in the video. I drink coca cola 8/10 times
I recall when I was a kid decades ago Coke wasn't as sweet as it is now (nowadays, I find it so sweet I no longer drink it).
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.
The amount of sugar in Coke hasn't changed in the last 40 years, and probably longer than that. It's been consistent at ~39g/12oz, even through the "New Coke" debacle. Wouldn't be surprised if Coke in the 40s, with sugar rationing, had less sugar though.
"The amount of sugar in Coke hasn't changed in the last 40 years,…"
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.
Our perceptions of sweet and bitter shift with age. Children crave super-sweet and shun any bitterness; as we age, sweetness becomes stronger and bitterness fades. I think you are just recognizing the shift in your tastes.
When I was a kid I thought it was insane that my dad watered down orange juice as he thought it was too sweet. Now that I'm nearing his age at the time, I water down my cola (with plain carbonated water) since I find it too sweet. So I would chalk it up to changes in your taste over changes in the product.
I too thought it was my palate and perhaps it's partially so, but it's also more than that. We're now in an era of 'engineered sweetness' to maximize sales.
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:
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.
Yeah, likely so. Back then it was almost certainty sucrose (cane sugar), today it'll be likely fructose (from maize) or a fructose/sucrose combo. Weight for weight fructose is considerably sweeter than sucrose.
Also where I am (Australia) it's always sucrose (unless fully imported) because of the large cane sugar industry in Queensland.
I didn't watch the video, but assuming they used a mass spectrometer, the end result will be identical to the real thing, anyone tasting otherwise is deluding themselves.
The video explains how the gas based mass spectrometers he had (indirect) access to don't normally pick up nonvolatile compounds like tannins. It was a big breakthrough that since he didn't have cocoa leaf extract, and he basically nailed everything else, he couldn't really understand what he was missing until he realised the extract would likely contain tannins.
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...
Have you ever seen that triangular chart comparing concentrations, impurities , etc? It's generally presented on log scales and very effectively demonstrates the often enormous number of trace-level compounds in otherwise substances deemed pure. It's the absolute pinnacle when it comes to teaching chem students about purity.
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.
Someone once said the reason we had alcohol before civilization is that we carry around a chemical testing laboratory in our faces.
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.
There have been a number of taste tests that show that, when blindfolded, most people can't distinguish between Coke and Sprite, let alone Coke and a close imitation, without the visual cue: throw together enough sugar, acid, and carbonation, and it overwhelms the body's ability to distinguish taste. It's a story often repeated in marketing (like Twitchells' Branded Nation), because forging a distinction between indistinguishable parity products is marketing's job.
I think if you believe this I'd recommend trying it yourself.
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.
I'll say that the 'Zero' products have gotten quite good. Not indistinguishable, but closer than I expected. On a couple of occasions I've inadvertently purchased real Dr Pepper instead of Dr Pepper Zero and not realized I was drinking the real thing. That's high praise for the Zero version (notably, the Diet version of Dr Pepper, while it has a following of its own, is extremely unlike real Dr Pepper).
I don't know but I recently drank coca cola which my brother ordered and then after a few days, I decided to drink diet coca cola because I was discussing it with my brother and he mentioned that diet and normal coke are the same price and I started wondering if there are negative effects to normal coke and not much for diet coke and they both are same price and I am drinking it for the taste, then diet coke makes the most sense so I decided to order it
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
Can confirm, could never stand the taste of Diet Coke, but Coke Zero tastes pretty close to the original to me! To the point that I pretty much never drink regular Coke anymore, if Coke Zero is available. There's basically no downside to going with Zero, imo. And the upside of no calories is pretty great.
That’s because Diet Coke is not based on classic Coke. It’s based on new coke, it should really be called diet new coke. Coke Zero is based on Coca Cola classic.
If Diet Coke has a bitter taste to you (like it does to me) you may have a genetic mutation that allows aspartame to bind to both sweet and bitter taste receptors (as I understand it). For most people it only binds to sweet receptors.
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!
> You mention about Dr pepper and how strikingly similar Dr Pepper zero is, what are some other drinks which have a genuinely similar.
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.
That's interesting. I'll need to find some Dr Pepper Zero and try it. My history of Dr Pepper and of diet sodas goes like this.
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.
I can't drink normal coke, it disgusts me, leaves an unpleasant sensation on my teeth, probably the sugar, but love the zero. It's also zero cal, which is a huge bonus.
Could be wrong but I heard phosphoric acid is in similar amounts in all of them for the unusual reason that this inorganic acid actually enhances (brings out) the cola flavor. Seems this doesn't happen with normal carboxylic food acids, malic, citric, tartaric, etc.
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.
That link actually clearly says down in the body that they could pick the lemon lime out from the colas, which makes sense.
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.
Lol, and here I am choking in shock when I grab a sip from a sprite can instead of the coke that I thought it was. Turns out I was just blindly (literally) falling for marketing? I don't think so, Tim.
Most people prefer Pepsi's taste. Unless the brands are revealed, then the brand recognition sets in and your brain rewards you more for choosing Coca Cola (c)
So you can taste it, but that doesn't matter in the end.
Last I recall, you get different answers if you taste just a sip verses a larger amount. Pepsi has a good first taste, but after a couple of sips it's pretty overpoweringly sweet, even compared to other sodas.
This is irrelevant and misleading. Just because many people cannot tell flavors apart doesn’t mean that the products are parity and are marketing differentiated.
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.
Supposedly Jell-O was originally to be clear but they needed the food coloring to convince your brain you weren’t just tasting sugar and citric acid instead of the little bit of flavor they added per recipe.
