Secret Formula: The Inside Story of How Coca-Cola Became the Best-Known Brand in the World

by Frederick Allen

Dobbs would take the title of vice president and manager of sales and advertising, in effect becoming Howard’s chief deputy.

(As the company’s lawyers liked to point out, Grape-Nuts cereal had won protection in the courts even though it contained neither grapes nor nuts.)

For nearly a quarter-century, Candler had treated the Coca-Cola Company as a sort of personal corporation; it owned all of his real estate in addition to the soft drink business.

When the neighbors finally succeeded in forcing him to get rid of his personal zoo—one of the many lawsuits he faced was filed by a neighbor who was bitten by a fugitive baboon—he gave the entire collection to the city, thereby founding the Atlanta Zoo.

“when the testers tried it with eyes open, the assertion was made that the uncolored product tasted different.”

It was a parallel discovery to the one company officials made with New Coke nearly seven decades later. Colorless Coke was scrapped.

Dobbs threw himself wholeheartedly into the campaign to keep...

The episode was a foreshadowing of the strategy that would serve Coca-Cola so well during World War II: Lobby furiously behind the scenes, give in gracefully when the cause is lost, and be sure to associate the product with the highest national interest.

sales almost doubled to nearly 19 million gallons, or about two and a half billion servings, enough to provide an average of thirty Cokes a year for every man, woman, and child in the United States.

The company privately agreed to cut the amount of caffeine in Coca-Cola by half, to six-tenths of a grain per serving, and the government responded by dropping all charges.

Behind the scenes, however, the Candler family’s affairs had grown dangerously complicated.

Howard, Asa Jr., Lucy, Walter, and William now owned 69 shares apiece and controlled the company.

Sam Dobbs got nothing. Aside from the 23 shares he already owned—a third of the portion that now belonged to each of his cousins—

At the regular Coca-Cola directors’ meeting in May 1919, Sam Dobbs ventured the suggestion that the company consider having its books audited.

negotiating his own private deal to sell the Coca-Cola Company, and he needed the audit to verify the financial status of the business.

the buyer he had found was a man Asa Candler detested, Ernest Woodruff.

Woodruff became known as the most aggressive financier in town, the nearest thing Atlanta had to a Wall Street baron.

The first part of the deal involved the payout to the Candler family,

But Woodruff and his partners made a fateful decision. Instead of turning a quick profit and walking away, they wanted to keep a stake in the company.

What happened next provided the basis for some of the great family fortunes in Atlanta, but at the time the mood was one of haste and uncertainty.

Once all the paperwork was completed in a few weeks, the brokers would be turning around and offering the shares to the public, and there was every reason to anticipate the same high level of enthusiasm.

People were going to buy the stock of the new Coca-Cola Company, and they were going to pay $40 a share,

Two of the trustees were Ernest Woodruff and Gene Stetson.

The third was Coca-Cola’s new president, Sam Dobbs.

For the second time in his life, thirty-one years after carting its inventory across town in a dray, Dobbs was responsible fo...

* Using his column in Good Housekeeping as a forum, Wiley continued to attack the company for several years to come.

Trust Company was buyer, seller, lender, and middleman, making money on each step.

Coca-Cola common stock was listed on the New York Stock Exchange as “KO” and the designation seemed entirely appropriate. It was a knockout.

No one had the faintest idea that the Coca-Cola Company was on the brink of ruin.

The problem wa...

The cost of manufacturing syrup more than doubled in a matter of weeks.

When it came to making syrup, however, Woodruff and his fellow directors still relied on Howard Candler.

The new owners arranged a $1 million line of credit with Gene Stetson’s bank, Guaranty Trust—giving the only existing copy of the top-secret Coca-Cola formula as collateral.

In 1899, two young lawyers from Chattanooga, Benjamin Franklin Thomas and Joseph Brown Whitehead, arranged an introduction to Asa Candler, traveled to Atlanta, and made a pitch for the rights to put the soft drink in bottles.

In exchange, Candler said, he would sell them syrup and give them the nationwide rights to bottle Coca-Cola—free.

Customers faced a different sort of danger: spoilage.

Soda pop got its nickname from the “pop” that resulted when the wire and stopper were pushed down into the bottle.

Whitehead moved to Atlanta and used the money to open the first Coca-Cola bottling plant in the soft drink’s home town.

mechanical engineer in Baltimore named William Painter perfected and patented a new kind of closure—the bottle cap—that made the Hutchinson bottle obsolete and allowed for striking advances in mechanized washing and sterilization.

The Coca-Cola bottling system passed to a new generation.

By 1909, there were 397 Coca-Cola bottling plants in the United States,

In most cities, a franchise to bottle Coca-Cola was now considered a license to make money.

Over the years it has become an article of faith at the Coca-Cola Company that Asa Candler’s seemingly mindless giveaway of his bottling rights was

actually an act of genius, since it spurred a quick profusion of plants that otherwise might have taken decades to develop.

Candler really did throw away something of tr...

Putting Coca-Cola in a specially shaped bottle would help tremendously with marketing.

a trademarked package—to use in fighting the competition in court.

if it were 6 or 6½ ounces, say, instead of the usual 8 ounces, that woul...

They designed a bottle whose vertical striations and curved, bulging middle bore no resemblance whatsoever to the coca leaf or kola nut, but instead was a dead ringer for the totally unrelated seed pod of the cacao tree,

Thus was born one of the most familiar shapes in product history.