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

by Frederick Allen

In the years after World War II, Coke had expanded its presence to seventy-six countries, but in most of them it had only a fragile toehold.

The company built bottling plants—sixty-three in all—in every theater of the war,

There were more than a dozen alterations to Coca-Cola’s sanctified secret formula, many of them significant, in the ninety-nine years leading up to the introduction of New Coke.

Yet the company kept those changes quiet and jealously guarded the mystique and mythology of the formula.

Legend credits Pemberton with being the father of Coca-Cola, but Robinson was the father of the idea of Coca-Cola, and it was Robinson who kept the venture going through the early years when it very nearly died. He did so even though Pemberton tried to cheat him out of the business.

Pemberton was doing well enough in 1879 that he began withdrawing from the drug business to give his full attention to manufacturing proprietary medicines. His next product was his most successful. It involved a new drug with remarkable properties that Pemberton thought gave “a sense of increased intelligence and a feeling as though the body was possessed of a new power formerly unknown to the individual.…” Cocaine.

One of the things the American people learned about Grant’s illness was that he gained relief from his dreadful, wracking pain by using a new miracle drug called cocaine.

By 1886, Atlanta had five soda fountains operating during the summer months, and the principals of Pemberton Chemical wanted a beverage they could sell by the glass. At 75 cents or $1 a bottle, even the most popular patent medicines had a limited market and tended to appeal to those who were sick or thought they were. But almost everyone could afford a nickel for a soft drink, and the potential clientele included anyone who got thirsty

Pemberton added to this brew the fluid extract of coca leaves. Exactly how much cocaine went into the inaugural batch of Doc Pemberton’s new soft drink syrup is impossible to calculate more than a century later, but even a touch of the drug, in combination with the sugar and caffeine—four times the amount in today’s Coke, or about the same as a strong cup of coffee—made Pemberton’s concoction quite a stimulating beverage.

As late as the turn of the century, when production exceeded a quarter of a million gallons and sales were recorded in every state of the union, the corporate headquarters in Atlanta employed only twenty people.

In the late summer of 1906, in a small suite he rented for $5 a month, D’Arcy opened his own office in downtown St. Louis. Dobbs gave the fledgling D’Arcy Advertising Company a total of $4,602 in billings that first year,

Before D’Arcy took over, the women depicted in Coca-Cola’s ads tended to look either girlishly innocent, or, in the case of the professional actresses who endorsed the soft drink, stiff and Victorian.

After D’Arcy came on the scene, the models remained fresh and wholesome, but there was a new, unmistakably flirtatious air about them.

In 1908, he created an animated billboard alongside the Pennsylvania Railroad,

A year later, D’Arcy hired a dirigible that cruised slowly over Washington, D.C., carrying giant Coca-Cola signs on either side.

Asa Candler was able to give a $1 million cash gift in 1914 to his brother’s school, Emory University, to move its main campus from the countryside to Atlanta;

In 1919, after the last restrictions were lifted, the company was able to satisfy a soaring demand that had accumulated during the war years, and 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.

Coca-Cola syrup was half sugar, and by 1919 the company had become the largest consumer of granulated cane sugar in the world, using nearly 100 million pounds a year.

One month the total sales in all of France amounted to the paltry sum of $94.22.

When the war ended, the Coca-Cola Company had sixty-three overseas bottling plants in operation, in venues as far-flung as Egypt, Iceland, Iran, West Africa, and New Guinea.

After gulping down more than a billion servings of Coca-Cola, eleven million veterans were returning with a lifelong attachment to the soft drink.

More than anything else, the Coca-Cola Company succeeded because it granted its bottling franchises to prominent foreign citizens and hired foreign nationals in its workforce.

By 1955, the Export Corporation was selling concentrate to 418 bottlers in 92 countries and territories, yet only a handful of its employees—fewer than one percent—were American.

Coca-Cola was in effect a French company in France, a Greek company in Greece, a Mexican company in Mexico. Resistance melted because most o...

Dealing with partners from other cultures gave Woodruff and his circle at Plum Street a unique perspective and sense of tolerance that was ...

Fully 95 percent of the world’s population, five billion people, lived outside the United States. Unlike Americans, they were a largely untapped audience.

“When I think of Indonesia,” Keough liked to say, “a country on the Equator, with 180 million people, a median age of eighteen, and a Moslem ban on alcohol, I feel I know what heaven looks like.”

China, which opened its doors to Coca-Cola in 1979, had a billion people and a per capita consumption of ...

In America, on average, every man, woman, and child gulped down three hu...

the company’s soft drinks were distributed mostly by truck—only now the vehicles in the system numbered more than 100,000, by far the largest commercial fleet in the world.

By 1994, the company and its bottlers had 650,000 employees on the payroll, and they were selling more than 685 million soft drinks a day.

If all the Coke ever produced were placed in traditional 6½-ounce hoopskirt bottles, the public relations department calculated, two and a half trillion bottles would be filled, and those bottles, laid end to end, would reach around the globe at the Equator 12,000 times (or a third of the way to Saturn).

With 41 percent of the overall U.S. market, Coca-Cola’s brands outsold Pepsi’s by eight points, a comfortable margin that held steady into the mid-1990s.