I used to be a big fan of Coke and Dr Pepper and rarely drink soda anymore. I stopped for health reasons though I still enjoy a nice ice cold Coke or Dr P. I once read up on the flavor of Coke which is said to be mostly cinnamon and vanilla and something strange happened: coke went from tasting like coke to tasting like cinnamon in vanilla. It's like how you cant un-hear muddled song lyrics you mistook for something else until you read the lyrics and they became clear. Same with Dr Pepper: vanilla and caramel. Sort of ruined the flavors for me for a while. Made giving it up easier.
One night I Was shopping, passed the soda, and a thought popped into my head: why not try to make my own soda? I have pure vanilla extract, cinnamon and sugar. So I bought a case of seltzer and spent the night making my own Dr Pepper and Coke. I caramelized sugar in a sauce pan for the Dr P which came out pretty good. Overall they were decent analogs but not anywhere near perfect. It was a fun itch to scratch.
I heard Germans hate American root beer because they think it tastes like toothpaste and that very thought ruined root beer for me for a few years (until a sunny day when I was just dying for a root beer float and it absolutely hit the spot).
I’ve tried Spruce Beer before and my brain rejected it for similar reasons - it tasted like house cleaner. If they’ve got anything that has that scent that’s dangerous, I imagine the brain wires similarly :D
I used to think the same thing, hated root beer. The nasty flavor combined with the word root conjured up images of uprooted plant root balls covered in dirt. Yum yum. Then I had the alcoholic Not Your Father's Root Beer" and really enjoyed the flavor. What I don't know is the flavorings as both sassafras and sarsaparilla are used so it might be one or the other or perhaps a combination that tastes better.
My sister got some root beer at McD's once (London) and I tried some. It tasted like floor cleaner to me and I've never tried it again. Is that just McD's version?
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
I don't drink much soda, maybe a coke once a year. Over the years the taste of coke has changed. Every year when I get that craving and drink one, it tastes different. So either the recipe has changed multiple times and there isn't one true coke flavour, or my taste buds might be faulty.
Coke is actually very different from country to country and less so from state to state. This is because Coke uses local bottle companies and they might be using different water. The coke you buy at your local store is probably bottled somewhere close to keep shipping costs down.
If you're a fan of Dr.Pepper, you'll notice they have 2 different bottles based on where you buy. That's because in some regions, Dr.Pepper uses Pepsi for bottling and in others it uses Coke bottlers.
I divide Coke into USA vs ROW. The HFCS stuff in USA tastes absolutely nothing like the cane sugar Coke from anywhere else, which is why everyone is always trying to buy the Mexican stuff in the USA.
Mexico coke is cane sugar based instead of made with high fructose corn syrup. But didn't Trump say that they will ban HFCS in coke in favor of cane sugar?
The sugar sweetened Coke’s are unique, but I think McDonald’s consistently has the best Coke you can get. Unlike most restaurants, they store syrup in stainless steal containers instead of plastic bags and they use a higher syrup to soda ratio than most places.
I’m not sure if the flavor has changed much in the past 30 years, but I do know that a McDonald’s Coke is almost always good.
Now I am wondering are there any industrial processes that use a common commercial product as a standard?
Coke, Guinness, etc all probably have exquisite quality control. Is it in the manual of any equipment, “congratulations on your new FooBar pH meter. To confirm the correct operation, a CokeCola should give a reading of X”
I was more imagining a completely pedestrian sourced sample. Those are likely large aggregate pools to minimize heterogeneity. Looking for something like, “Go to corner store, buy 12 pack canned CokeCola (with aspartame), dilute 1:10, measure”
Do we count the time some children measured the vitamin C in Ribena for a science fair, and discovered there wasn't any, despite high vitamin C being their main marketing point?
The concentrate is produced by Ballina Beverages, then regional bottlers add the bulk ingredients like sugar and water. Hence every version being a little different.
And that's just bottlers. Fountain soda is also diluted from concentrate. So local water can affect the flavor, as can the calibration of the soda fountain. The better retailers will carbon-filter their water and check calibration regularly but the average convenience store? Varies wildly.
Random tidbit from my youth: when the Coke truck would come deliver a crate of Coke bottles to our house in Mexico, each Coke bottle had a little stick of sugarcane in it. I don't think it was like that in all places in Mexico. Street vendors would have giant unlabeled jugs of Coke, and sell it to you by pouring it into a plastic bag with a straw in it.
Reminded me of the book Fast Food Nation where they describe the artificial flavor industry (Chapter 5), and visit labs in New Jersey where fast food tastes are created by "flavorists". Most of the taste comes from smell, via gas molecules released in the mouth.
The book also covers how they scout out real estate, and how they create french fries by shooting potatoes at 80 mph. (A bit different from in-n-out)
Note: don't bother watching the movie, it's nothing like the book.
I don’t drink cola and I’m usually not into chemistry videos, but this was genuinely entertaining. The "Mass Spectrometry" and “What do other people think?” segment was especially fun; great pacing and presentation. LabCoatz is my first chemistry channel subscription :)
One of the really interesting thing (to me) in this video is that the very distinctive "your whole mouth sticks and is slimy from the sugar and even your teeth feel different" can be traced from a single component that's added seemingly for this purpose. And it's the thing I can't stand with regular non-zero coke (well the sugar level too, but that's pure health thing).
It would also be very interesting if he could get his hands on coke from different markets as the formulation varies from country to country. One of the most obvious is the amount of cinnamon, but it would be very interesting to know if more differences were there.
Another interrogation of mine would be if, sugar aside, the formula is different between regular coke and coke zero. I'd bet is is, simply to offset the aftertaste that aspartam/artificial sweeteners have, but I'm curious if other non-sweetness related ingredients do change.
I've always assumed that's either the corn syrup or something else that's in the American version, because I swear growing up in Italy I never noticed this.
Haven't done a side-by-side comparison, though, so maybe it's just my memory of my childhood tastebuds.
I live in France and there definitely is this feeling. I may be biased, because I only drink coke zero, which has a distinct "dryness" to it wrt other sodas. However, it's the only non-zero soda where I notice this feeling.
Children have a much more sweet tooth than adults, so it may be the reason you did not notice it, as it would not necessarily register as bothersome. I liked to bite into direct sugar cubes as a kid, which I would definitely not stand today.
Quite informative, and a laundry list of flavor names/chemicals that sound far more dangerous than they taste. Interesting find is vinegar, which might have offered a small germ-fighting benefit and given Coca Cola the 'medical' qualities it initially sold for...
The ingredients he uses are not necessarily what CC uses, but they're just a way to replicate the flavor profile. Notably he lacks the coca extract so he has to make up for it.
It was a reformulation from a popular drink where wine was infused with coca leaves and kola nuts, popular with Pope Leo XIII who appeared on poster advertisements for it. (and many others)
Georgia passed prohibition and coca-cola was an invention to replace the now banned beverages.
You're assuming that the company uses the same formula as then. That would be really awesome.
The original formula contained coca leaves (the raw material for cocaine) and extract from kola seeds (that's where the name comes from).
Beverages containing cocaine were very common until the beginning of the century (search for "Vin Mariani"). Even today you can buy coca leaves in the supermarkets of some Latin American countries (Bolivia, Peru, etc).
An huge corporation using the raw material of cocaine to produce the most popular soda in the world would be the funniest story of our times.
> An huge corporation using the raw material of cocaine to produce the most popular soda in the world would be the funniest story of our times.
Coca Cola does still use coca leaves for its flavor:
"In a telephone interview from Coca-Cola's Atlanta headquarters, Randy Donaldson, a company spokesman, said, ''Ingredients from the coca leaf are used, but there is no cocaine in it and it is all tightly overseen by regulatory authorities.''"
...
"Bales of coca destined for Stepan and, ultimately, for Coca-Cola are shipped to the Maywood plant through ports in New York and New Jersey, Mr. O'Brien said. Each shipment carries its own import permit, also issued by the D.E.A."
It would be interesting to know more about how it's actually manufactured and whether he has ideas about why the classic formula was changed -- maybe something to do with the cost of one of the steps, which the video suggests could be true, as it's damn complicated
At a high level: probably they buy flavors from the flavor houses by the rail car or tanker truck and mix them with water, sweetener, and gum Arabic. I’ve seen it at much smaller scale, but I bet Coke has some amazingly large machinery given the scale.
Coke is nasty, literally feels like my teeth are dissolving the moment I drink it. Not to detract from the amazing science. I am still guilty drinking the sugarfree redbull and for soda if I would drink it, mountain dew.
I didn't see the full video, but in a nutshell its quite some effort.
For a person who has a bad tastebud like me, every dark colored carbonated drink tastes almost the same to me :(
There's a lot of reasons Carbonated Sugar Water, Inc. isn't a $200B business, and Coca Cola (tm) is, that "just a lot of sugar" doesn't even begin to explain.
that's a very oversimplification of it. how people can be willing to consume a beverage that can be used to eat the corrosion off of battery terminals is beyond me. so they'd be missing that on top of the sugar, unless of course they are drinking the sugar free versions, then it's just the battery cleanser
The marketing and trademark is more important than the formula. If you created and sold a perfect Coke clone you wouldn't make a dent in their market share. You could make one better than Coke and not make a dent because it wouldn't be Coke.
I think his idea was to make a very close copy that costs very little compared to the finished product, to e.g. save cost of your own consumption (in the video it says he made a mixture that can be mixed with water and sugar to create 5000 liters of Coca-Cola)...
I formulate, bottle, and sell beverages and I’ve used many of these ingredients. They are very potent, so yeah, the ingredients other than sugar are only a tiny fraction. They can be hard to source in small amounts sometimes though.
The non-nutritive sweeteners in their pure form are wild too. They are 2 + orders of magnitude sweeter than sugar and they come in very fine powders. You have to mask up when you work with them if you don’t want to taste vague sweetness for awhile.
In Australia Coca-Cola isn't allowed to import coca leaf extract for flavor, so it tastes very similar to one of the 3rd party knock off brands you'll find in the US. In Australia everyone drinks Pepsi because of this. Without the coca leaf Coca-Cola tastes imo pretty terrible.
What makes this video revolutionary is he was able to find an alternative to the coca leaf that has a near identical flavor. If it's as good tasting as advertised this knowledge could empower 3rd party producers to make a coke drink that will finally rival Coca-Cola in popularity.
I would bet that supermarket brand cola would sell more than it does now if it were closer to Coke.
I think sooner or later, everyone who drinks a lot of soda will try the store brand as well as other colas that are non-belligerents in the cola wars. Some of them are ok, some are good for some mixed drinks, some are so bad I won't even finish the pack. Even though I prefer Pepsi, if I knew brand X was pretty close to Coke, I might choose it when it costs less and money is tight.
My country is going to require a recyclable plastic bottles. That means bringing empty plastic bottles full of air into a shop, so a machine can squash them and send somewhere.
This will bring down marketshare significantly. It's incredibly hassle, which is likely the point.
I am looking for good and cheap sodastream cola syrup, but they are very expensive.
Both Pepsi and Coke did make beverages people preferred. The Pepsi challenge did make some dent in their market share (but Coke is doing just fine) and New Coke ended up just selling more old Coke. So your story checks out
I'd love to get hands on this coca cola's syrup. I know that this video has just recently released but I feel like this might help in producing indie levels of quantity of syrups which can be sold to indie users
I am not even much of a coca cola person. Usually I drink Pepsi or mountain dew but this video is one of the most high efforts video I have ever watched. Period.
massive respects to LabCoatz. I seriously didn't expect this level of quality, its shocking how good youtube is. This feels so professional and well thought of in a way
I am still in high school and I was studying chemistry. I don't enjoy chemistry (In fact I complain often so much about being forced to study chem to go to a decent CS uni that even AI LLM's wrapped of 2025 picked it up on my admittedly hate on chemistry https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/Imustaskforhelp)
I think that the chemistry (atleast what I study) is fundamentally different from the science shown here. This is the chemistry which genuinely attracted me. Studying biomolecules and seeing the structures some of them were even familiar.
I don't know but in a sense it kind of helps an genuine interest in the subject while being genuinely practical so I thank this video creator.
Some videos are just gems, this is one of them. I was constantly thinking surely Coke is so large of a company, everyone's heard of the secret, surely someone else must have made something so effective ( I was thinking of a large company) but it turns out that large companies dont really end up doing this and its the one man shop with genuine passion to his craft (in this chemistry) which really ends up doing spectacular.
Massive respects. Can't recommend it enough right now.
Also I am thinking of one thing but what if an non profit can be established who can produce such bottles of "lab cola" perhaps at a low-mid --> high scale.
I'd genuinely support and imagine that you can buy lab cola which can be environmentally safe and the proceeds go to social causes which you can align to. Wouldn't that just be amazing?
This opens up so much more possibilities!!
Edit: I thought about the non profit idea even more and I think that this can position itself as for fundraising as well. Imagine this genuine movement of slowly owning what we actually eat no more secret recipes. This seems to be the open source of Food and I am all for it!
If one worries about the supply chain, they can supply it via amazon or local providers (yes I know Amazon is morally shitty at times but I feel like this might answer some questions that people might have about that coca cola has worldwide presence, how is it gonna compete)
One could also bootstrap the whole thing and directly sell to customers or businesses as well (the businesses can have genuine value to it, I don't think that at scale, there is much of a difference in pricing and some amount of pricing gains are okay for what its worth if the mission is noble)
Best part is that Coca Cola can do nothing about all of it and the ideas are limitless, the bottleneck was the recipe which has now been effectively reverse engineered haha. There is a genuine ability for people to bring change in beverage industry. I am certainly hyped for what its worth. Someone please contact LabCoatz if you have affiliates and give him this idea if possible or anyone implement it themselves if they follow a similar field/expertise to this. If so, I would be your first customer for the non profit :)
I didn’t like studying chemistry at all when I was your age. But I also didn’t like physics until I took a class thar focused on it in a practical way. So definitely listen to your interests but perhaps you’ll find a better on-ramp to chemistry if you focus on food chemistry or something else more pragmatic.
But cheers for showing support to high quality science content on YT. Appreciation is a great instinct to nurture.
i did well at all the stoichiometry, and energy calculations, but i never thoguht of chemistry as something fun until i started seeing the variius youtube videos of figuring/designing out chemical and filtering processes and trying them.
unfortunately thast long after i might have learned how to do that problem solving. maybe if i go back to school ill try to find such classes. i imagine biochem also has a lot of that
No, I think my hate (Edit: Hate seems a strong word, I meant dislike perhaps, Its just that I usually blame chem for any grades loss because thats the reality more on that later) in chemistry stems from the fact that people are able to grasp it naturally for some reason and chem is considered very high scoring so its depressing and you resent the subject if you can't achieve score in chem (mind you, that where I live, the individual subjects score don't matter but the aggregate, so in essense, chem has equal weightage as much as maths or physics while being really simpler but still requires a fundamental grasp which I find unintuitive at times and somehow unable to understand so the system feels a little unfair to me at times in the unique situation but oh well) I still feel like I dont study chem that much when the feedback loop just exited when I was studying and didnt get marks so I decided to stop studying it that much but now I am starting to genuinely focus 100% on chem most of the time because I just have to remember a few things and instant boost in my marks (or so I am thinking, we will see how this goes but it seems to be the best utilization of my time right now)
I could probably blame some parts of the education system but I don't think that the system can probably change regarding it. Still, I just wanted to share my frustrations regarding it where everything kind of becomes overcompetitive while you have a hobby in computers and I feel like genuine passion towards computing/linux and other things and want to make it a job because in my case I feel like money's valuable only in the end to do something that I enjoy and in this case, I can get both paid and enjoy without having to go through a retirement phase (or so my thoughts on FIRE, I'd still invest/save most of the money as money is rather not the big part of why I am doing this in my opinion) and Chem doesn't have anything related to it for what its worth.
I still have to go read chemistry though. But I don't know why but something in this video genuinely clicked chemistry for me where I could watch a 100 videos like this (although the point can be that I am now doing it out of my own free will and not a rigorous syllabus with tests and rewards/punishments systems basically)
Sorry for the yap, just wanted to get it off my chest. I have nothing against chem as a subject tho, I am sure that its interesting and this video sorts of proves it but I feel like I am more inclined towards software engineering but it sucks that I have to study chem to go do what I actually want in life (which requires a degree for maximal benefit which requires good marks aka a decent/huge focus on chem as well right now)
> But cheers for showing support to high quality science content on YT. Appreciation is a great instinct to nurture.
Thanks! I appreciate it, Have a nice day!
(Also edit once again) but I want to touch on the reason why I feel appreciating it even more so is because a single guy is able to compete against (essentially) a 200 Billion $ GIANT.
Such levels of individual freedom and achievements should be celebrated by the society just for the sake of it (and in this case we can see some other benefits as well as I told in the initial comment)
They empower Individual youth and Individuals in general and its very empowering. Generally the same reason I love Open source as well. Bringing real change to the world and leaving a fingerprint on Humanity I suppose. Even small things like these provide me and maybe others hope against darkness created by system of corruption being witnessed most around the world and monopolization/ big businesses doing shady practices most often.
So full disclosure, I haven't watched the video, and I've already seen some couple comments since I always take a brief scan before I do.
That being said: The thing about soda that most people get wrong is the level of fizz. Nothing is comparable to commercial soda just based off that. So, when you start off from a lower level baseline of "your fizz" < "their fizz", and add in recipe differences...well, it'll be a fun watch, regardless.
Small edit on this: They used a soda stream, which definitely doesn't add as much carbonation as commercial equipment does. Based only upon that, the taste profile will end up different for most, and despite all the science involved, it will lead to the over use of other flavors to compensate. Respectable try, however. He should sell premixed stuff on his website, although I imagine that is a regulatory nightmare, given that some of the stuff he used isn't food grade.
This is a good alternative to redirect profits from a billion dollar company, but it still leaves the problem of selling a diabetes-causing, tooth-decaying addictive substance.
if you watch to the end, he provides his final recipe, with the caveat that making the batch the first time will be pretty expensive, and also make sure you have good safety gear on sicne some of the ingredients are dangerous when not diluted.
Huh there is so much limonene in Coca Cola?! Limonene works as a very good…pesticide and herbicide! I did a research project on limonene like 10 years ago with my mentor and it outperformed most commercial pesticides in controlled settings. It really can't be that great to ingest.
I used to be a big fan of Coke and Dr Pepper and rarely drink soda anymore. I stopped for health reasons though I still enjoy a nice ice cold Coke or Dr P. I once read up on the flavor of Coke which is said to be mostly cinnamon and vanilla and something strange happened: coke went from tasting like coke to tasting like cinnamon in vanilla. It's like how you cant un-hear muddled song lyrics you mistook for something else until you read the lyrics and they became clear. Same with Dr Pepper: vanilla and caramel. Sort of ruined the flavors for me for a while. Made giving it up easier.
One night I Was shopping, passed the soda, and a thought popped into my head: why not try to make my own soda? I have pure vanilla extract, cinnamon and sugar. So I bought a case of seltzer and spent the night making my own Dr Pepper and Coke. I caramelized sugar in a sauce pan for the Dr P which came out pretty good. Overall they were decent analogs but not anywhere near perfect. It was a fun itch to scratch.
I heard Germans hate American root beer because they think it tastes like toothpaste and that very thought ruined root beer for me for a few years (until a sunny day when I was just dying for a root beer float and it absolutely hit the spot).
German here. Root beer does INDEED taste like toothpaste. Disguting. :)
We Germans drink Malzbier, which is equally unhealthy, but at least it tastes somewhat OK.
I’ve tried Spruce Beer before and my brain rejected it for similar reasons - it tasted like house cleaner. If they’ve got anything that has that scent that’s dangerous, I imagine the brain wires similarly :D
I used to think the same thing, hated root beer. The nasty flavor combined with the word root conjured up images of uprooted plant root balls covered in dirt. Yum yum. Then I had the alcoholic Not Your Father's Root Beer" and really enjoyed the flavor. What I don't know is the flavorings as both sassafras and sarsaparilla are used so it might be one or the other or perhaps a combination that tastes better.
It's true. You can find literally zero sodas, chewing gum or other candies that have the root beer taste in Germany.
My sister got some root beer at McD's once (London) and I tried some. It tasted like floor cleaner to me and I've never tried it again. Is that just McD's version?
There is a Swedish snus which tastes just like the smell of CRC 5-56. Not everyone loves it but boy it's nice. I have given up snus though.
Canadian here. I thought this was common knowledge.
Do they put sarsaparilla in their toothpaste?
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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.
Coke isn’t even consistent between factories, different bottle sizes and cans.
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.
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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.
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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
Never liked the 20oz plastic Coke bottles. The aluminum cans and 2liter plastic tasted fine though.
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Even the same drink tastes a little different at different temperature or if you use a plastic straw, metal straw, glass bottle, plastic bottle.
It is true: sweetness is very different across the globe due to nation preferences
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and water source has a great impact
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...
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This is wrong.
Same with perfume knock-offs
Spectrometer doesn’t tell you quantities, mixes, what have you.
You can emulate 90% of the first smell but never in life you can replicate entire bouquet, aftersmell, propriety molecules, etc.
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Mass spec is indeed demonstrated multiple times
Taste buds can detect chemicals in as concentrations as low as a few parts per million, I dunno.
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He doesn't compare the mass spec of his final product to a real coke, unless I missed it.
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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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1982/0...
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.
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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.
Coke and Sprite taste extremely different.
Coke and Pepsi are a lot closer but still distinguishable.
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If you cannot tell the difference between a cola and a lemonade, then that says more about the person performing the taste test than anything.
Sounds as believable as that nonsense about onions tasting the same as apples if you hold your nose.
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.
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Yea, you've never drank the off brand stuff I see. It's generally significantly different to me.
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.
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Fun fact: the most similar coke clone I've ever tasted was in Cuba.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TuKola
Another one is that in many countries Coke and Pepsi use artificial sweeteners even in their "original" product lines, which is plainly misleading.
I don't drink much soda, maybe a coke once a year. Over the years the taste of coke has changed. Every year when I get that craving and drink one, it tastes different. So either the recipe has changed multiple times and there isn't one true coke flavour, or my taste buds might be faulty.
Coke is actually very different from country to country and less so from state to state. This is because Coke uses local bottle companies and they might be using different water. The coke you buy at your local store is probably bottled somewhere close to keep shipping costs down.
If you're a fan of Dr.Pepper, you'll notice they have 2 different bottles based on where you buy. That's because in some regions, Dr.Pepper uses Pepsi for bottling and in others it uses Coke bottlers.
It's not only the water, there are more differences like high fructose corn syrup versus other sugar forms.
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Isn't Coca Cola water reverse osmosis filtered?
The taste of local water should be irrelevant.
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I divide Coke into USA vs ROW. The HFCS stuff in USA tastes absolutely nothing like the cane sugar Coke from anywhere else, which is why everyone is always trying to buy the Mexican stuff in the USA.
You should try the Coke made in Mexico. Easiest way I find it is by searching for “Mexico coke” on uber eats or something similar.
Most stores carrying products made in Mexico have it.
Mexico coke is cane sugar based instead of made with high fructose corn syrup. But didn't Trump say that they will ban HFCS in coke in favor of cane sugar?
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The sugar sweetened Coke’s are unique, but I think McDonald’s consistently has the best Coke you can get. Unlike most restaurants, they store syrup in stainless steal containers instead of plastic bags and they use a higher syrup to soda ratio than most places.
I’m not sure if the flavor has changed much in the past 30 years, but I do know that a McDonald’s Coke is almost always good.
I worked at McDonald’s 20 years ago and we used plastic syrup bags…. Never heard about these stainless steel containers you speak of.
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McDonald’s consistently has the worst Coke. Its so watered down and flat.
Check out the acquired podcast episode on Coca Cola. Amazingly reserached history on the business and evolution of the Coke forumla.
Yeah, it's a great listen:
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/coca-cola
Now I am wondering are there any industrial processes that use a common commercial product as a standard?
Coke, Guinness, etc all probably have exquisite quality control. Is it in the manual of any equipment, “congratulations on your new FooBar pH meter. To confirm the correct operation, a CokeCola should give a reading of X”
The government has reference products that a lot of processes use. https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductList?categoryId=a0l3d0000...
one that gets mentioned occasionally on the internet is the peanut butter: https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2387
I was more imagining a completely pedestrian sourced sample. Those are likely large aggregate pools to minimize heterogeneity. Looking for something like, “Go to corner store, buy 12 pack canned CokeCola (with aspartame), dilute 1:10, measure”
To go down that rathole, here is Tom Scott talking about the NIST standard reference materials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvJzi0BXcGI
Coincidentally, Guinness had a role to play in the development of modern quality control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset
Some of the most dimensionally accurate thickness aluminium foil you can buy is intended for cooking.
This ISO amuses me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103
Do we count the time some children measured the vitamin C in Ribena for a science fair, and discovered there wasn't any, despite high vitamin C being their main marketing point?
I just looked that up. Great story!
> Perfectly Replicating Coca Cola
Which version ? In EU it tastes different in almost every country.
The concentrate is produced by Ballina Beverages, then regional bottlers add the bulk ingredients like sugar and water. Hence every version being a little different.
And that's just bottlers. Fountain soda is also diluted from concentrate. So local water can affect the flavor, as can the calibration of the soda fountain. The better retailers will carbon-filter their water and check calibration regularly but the average convenience store? Varies wildly.
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Random tidbit from my youth: when the Coke truck would come deliver a crate of Coke bottles to our house in Mexico, each Coke bottle had a little stick of sugarcane in it. I don't think it was like that in all places in Mexico. Street vendors would have giant unlabeled jugs of Coke, and sell it to you by pouring it into a plastic bag with a straw in it.
For other science buffs out there,
https://www.youtube.com/@MassSpecEverything
is a great resource. He breaks down lots of the things you might be interested in.
Some of the interesting discovered flavor components in this trial were tea tree and basil (not shown in the video).
Yes I'm surprised basil wasn't included. How did you find out if it wasn't in the video?
One of the author-tagged comments, "fenchol is found in basil :)"
Reminded me of the book Fast Food Nation where they describe the artificial flavor industry (Chapter 5), and visit labs in New Jersey where fast food tastes are created by "flavorists". Most of the taste comes from smell, via gas molecules released in the mouth.
The book also covers how they scout out real estate, and how they create french fries by shooting potatoes at 80 mph. (A bit different from in-n-out)
Note: don't bother watching the movie, it's nothing like the book.
I don’t drink cola and I’m usually not into chemistry videos, but this was genuinely entertaining. The "Mass Spectrometry" and “What do other people think?” segment was especially fun; great pacing and presentation. LabCoatz is my first chemistry channel subscription :)
One of the really interesting thing (to me) in this video is that the very distinctive "your whole mouth sticks and is slimy from the sugar and even your teeth feel different" can be traced from a single component that's added seemingly for this purpose. And it's the thing I can't stand with regular non-zero coke (well the sugar level too, but that's pure health thing).
It would also be very interesting if he could get his hands on coke from different markets as the formulation varies from country to country. One of the most obvious is the amount of cinnamon, but it would be very interesting to know if more differences were there.
Another interrogation of mine would be if, sugar aside, the formula is different between regular coke and coke zero. I'd bet is is, simply to offset the aftertaste that aspartam/artificial sweeteners have, but I'm curious if other non-sweetness related ingredients do change.
"cloying" is the word you're looking for for that sugar mouthfeel
I've always assumed that's either the corn syrup or something else that's in the American version, because I swear growing up in Italy I never noticed this.
Haven't done a side-by-side comparison, though, so maybe it's just my memory of my childhood tastebuds.
I live in France and there definitely is this feeling. I may be biased, because I only drink coke zero, which has a distinct "dryness" to it wrt other sodas. However, it's the only non-zero soda where I notice this feeling.
Children have a much more sweet tooth than adults, so it may be the reason you did not notice it, as it would not necessarily register as bothersome. I liked to bite into direct sugar cubes as a kid, which I would definitely not stand today.
Quite informative, and a laundry list of flavor names/chemicals that sound far more dangerous than they taste. Interesting find is vinegar, which might have offered a small germ-fighting benefit and given Coca Cola the 'medical' qualities it initially sold for...
The ingredients he uses are not necessarily what CC uses, but they're just a way to replicate the flavor profile. Notably he lacks the coca extract so he has to make up for it.
I think that the cocaine was the origin of its medical debut.
It was a reformulation from a popular drink where wine was infused with coca leaves and kola nuts, popular with Pope Leo XIII who appeared on poster advertisements for it. (and many others)
Georgia passed prohibition and coca-cola was an invention to replace the now banned beverages.
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Cola nut also contains caffeine, so quite an energy drink between the two.
I was surprised to see nausea meds for kids that's phosphoric acid and sugar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose/fructose/phosphoric_ac...
I thought it was well known that Coca Cola contained phosphoric acid. It's one of the reasons why it's so bad for your teeth.
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I mean, uh, we used to not have any laws about this stuff:
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/pickyourpoison/exhibition...
to me the impressive thing is Coca Cola was formulated in the 1800s and yet even with modern equipment - most people fail to replicate it.
the original chemist who made Coca Cola was a genius
You're assuming that the company uses the same formula as then. That would be really awesome.
The original formula contained coca leaves (the raw material for cocaine) and extract from kola seeds (that's where the name comes from).
Beverages containing cocaine were very common until the beginning of the century (search for "Vin Mariani"). Even today you can buy coca leaves in the supermarkets of some Latin American countries (Bolivia, Peru, etc).
An huge corporation using the raw material of cocaine to produce the most popular soda in the world would be the funniest story of our times.
> An huge corporation using the raw material of cocaine to produce the most popular soda in the world would be the funniest story of our times.
Coca Cola does still use coca leaves for its flavor:
"In a telephone interview from Coca-Cola's Atlanta headquarters, Randy Donaldson, a company spokesman, said, ''Ingredients from the coca leaf are used, but there is no cocaine in it and it is all tightly overseen by regulatory authorities.''"
...
"Bales of coca destined for Stepan and, ultimately, for Coca-Cola are shipped to the Maywood plant through ports in New York and New Jersey, Mr. O'Brien said. Each shipment carries its own import permit, also issued by the D.E.A."
* https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/01/business/how-coca-cola-ob...
Inventing and replicating face different challenges though.
It would be interesting to know more about how it's actually manufactured and whether he has ideas about why the classic formula was changed -- maybe something to do with the cost of one of the steps, which the video suggests could be true, as it's damn complicated
At a high level: probably they buy flavors from the flavor houses by the rail car or tanker truck and mix them with water, sweetener, and gum Arabic. I’ve seen it at much smaller scale, but I bet Coke has some amazingly large machinery given the scale.
Coke is nasty, literally feels like my teeth are dissolving the moment I drink it. Not to detract from the amazing science. I am still guilty drinking the sugarfree redbull and for soda if I would drink it, mountain dew.
I didn't see the full video, but in a nutshell its quite some effort. For a person who has a bad tastebud like me, every dark colored carbonated drink tastes almost the same to me :(
You are not missing anything though.
Just a lot of sugar
There's a lot of reasons Carbonated Sugar Water, Inc. isn't a $200B business, and Coca Cola (tm) is, that "just a lot of sugar" doesn't even begin to explain.
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that's a very oversimplification of it. how people can be willing to consume a beverage that can be used to eat the corrosion off of battery terminals is beyond me. so they'd be missing that on top of the sugar, unless of course they are drinking the sugar free versions, then it's just the battery cleanser
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Could he patent-troll Coca cola?
He doesn’t want to change the world, he wants to sell sugar water!
Steve jobs hated this one trick..
The marketing and trademark is more important than the formula. If you created and sold a perfect Coke clone you wouldn't make a dent in their market share. You could make one better than Coke and not make a dent because it wouldn't be Coke.
I think his idea was to make a very close copy that costs very little compared to the finished product, to e.g. save cost of your own consumption (in the video it says he made a mixture that can be mixed with water and sugar to create 5000 liters of Coca-Cola)...
I formulate, bottle, and sell beverages and I’ve used many of these ingredients. They are very potent, so yeah, the ingredients other than sugar are only a tiny fraction. They can be hard to source in small amounts sometimes though.
The non-nutritive sweeteners in their pure form are wild too. They are 2 + orders of magnitude sweeter than sugar and they come in very fine powders. You have to mask up when you work with them if you don’t want to taste vague sweetness for awhile.
In Australia Coca-Cola isn't allowed to import coca leaf extract for flavor, so it tastes very similar to one of the 3rd party knock off brands you'll find in the US. In Australia everyone drinks Pepsi because of this. Without the coca leaf Coca-Cola tastes imo pretty terrible.
What makes this video revolutionary is he was able to find an alternative to the coca leaf that has a near identical flavor. If it's as good tasting as advertised this knowledge could empower 3rd party producers to make a coke drink that will finally rival Coca-Cola in popularity.
There is nothing true in this comment
* Importing coca-cola extract with coca extract is legal
* Coca Cola is significantly more popular than Pepsi in Australia
I would bet that supermarket brand cola would sell more than it does now if it were closer to Coke.
I think sooner or later, everyone who drinks a lot of soda will try the store brand as well as other colas that are non-belligerents in the cola wars. Some of them are ok, some are good for some mixed drinks, some are so bad I won't even finish the pack. Even though I prefer Pepsi, if I knew brand X was pretty close to Coke, I might choose it when it costs less and money is tight.
My country is going to require a recyclable plastic bottles. That means bringing empty plastic bottles full of air into a shop, so a machine can squash them and send somewhere.
This will bring down marketshare significantly. It's incredibly hassle, which is likely the point. I am looking for good and cheap sodastream cola syrup, but they are very expensive.
Both Pepsi and Coke did make beverages people preferred. The Pepsi challenge did make some dent in their market share (but Coke is doing just fine) and New Coke ended up just selling more old Coke. So your story checks out
it's easy: take some coke and put coke into it.
approximately 0.2 g per liter
I'd love to get hands on this coca cola's syrup. I know that this video has just recently released but I feel like this might help in producing indie levels of quantity of syrups which can be sold to indie users
I am not even much of a coca cola person. Usually I drink Pepsi or mountain dew but this video is one of the most high efforts video I have ever watched. Period.
massive respects to LabCoatz. I seriously didn't expect this level of quality, its shocking how good youtube is. This feels so professional and well thought of in a way
I am still in high school and I was studying chemistry. I don't enjoy chemistry (In fact I complain often so much about being forced to study chem to go to a decent CS uni that even AI LLM's wrapped of 2025 picked it up on my admittedly hate on chemistry https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/Imustaskforhelp)
I think that the chemistry (atleast what I study) is fundamentally different from the science shown here. This is the chemistry which genuinely attracted me. Studying biomolecules and seeing the structures some of them were even familiar.
I don't know but in a sense it kind of helps an genuine interest in the subject while being genuinely practical so I thank this video creator.
Some videos are just gems, this is one of them. I was constantly thinking surely Coke is so large of a company, everyone's heard of the secret, surely someone else must have made something so effective ( I was thinking of a large company) but it turns out that large companies dont really end up doing this and its the one man shop with genuine passion to his craft (in this chemistry) which really ends up doing spectacular.
Massive respects. Can't recommend it enough right now.
Also I am thinking of one thing but what if an non profit can be established who can produce such bottles of "lab cola" perhaps at a low-mid --> high scale.
I'd genuinely support and imagine that you can buy lab cola which can be environmentally safe and the proceeds go to social causes which you can align to. Wouldn't that just be amazing?
This opens up so much more possibilities!!
Edit: I thought about the non profit idea even more and I think that this can position itself as for fundraising as well. Imagine this genuine movement of slowly owning what we actually eat no more secret recipes. This seems to be the open source of Food and I am all for it!
If one worries about the supply chain, they can supply it via amazon or local providers (yes I know Amazon is morally shitty at times but I feel like this might answer some questions that people might have about that coca cola has worldwide presence, how is it gonna compete)
One could also bootstrap the whole thing and directly sell to customers or businesses as well (the businesses can have genuine value to it, I don't think that at scale, there is much of a difference in pricing and some amount of pricing gains are okay for what its worth if the mission is noble)
Best part is that Coca Cola can do nothing about all of it and the ideas are limitless, the bottleneck was the recipe which has now been effectively reverse engineered haha. There is a genuine ability for people to bring change in beverage industry. I am certainly hyped for what its worth. Someone please contact LabCoatz if you have affiliates and give him this idea if possible or anyone implement it themselves if they follow a similar field/expertise to this. If so, I would be your first customer for the non profit :)
I didn’t like studying chemistry at all when I was your age. But I also didn’t like physics until I took a class thar focused on it in a practical way. So definitely listen to your interests but perhaps you’ll find a better on-ramp to chemistry if you focus on food chemistry or something else more pragmatic.
But cheers for showing support to high quality science content on YT. Appreciation is a great instinct to nurture.
i did well at all the stoichiometry, and energy calculations, but i never thoguht of chemistry as something fun until i started seeing the variius youtube videos of figuring/designing out chemical and filtering processes and trying them.
unfortunately thast long after i might have learned how to do that problem solving. maybe if i go back to school ill try to find such classes. i imagine biochem also has a lot of that
No, I think my hate (Edit: Hate seems a strong word, I meant dislike perhaps, Its just that I usually blame chem for any grades loss because thats the reality more on that later) in chemistry stems from the fact that people are able to grasp it naturally for some reason and chem is considered very high scoring so its depressing and you resent the subject if you can't achieve score in chem (mind you, that where I live, the individual subjects score don't matter but the aggregate, so in essense, chem has equal weightage as much as maths or physics while being really simpler but still requires a fundamental grasp which I find unintuitive at times and somehow unable to understand so the system feels a little unfair to me at times in the unique situation but oh well) I still feel like I dont study chem that much when the feedback loop just exited when I was studying and didnt get marks so I decided to stop studying it that much but now I am starting to genuinely focus 100% on chem most of the time because I just have to remember a few things and instant boost in my marks (or so I am thinking, we will see how this goes but it seems to be the best utilization of my time right now)
I could probably blame some parts of the education system but I don't think that the system can probably change regarding it. Still, I just wanted to share my frustrations regarding it where everything kind of becomes overcompetitive while you have a hobby in computers and I feel like genuine passion towards computing/linux and other things and want to make it a job because in my case I feel like money's valuable only in the end to do something that I enjoy and in this case, I can get both paid and enjoy without having to go through a retirement phase (or so my thoughts on FIRE, I'd still invest/save most of the money as money is rather not the big part of why I am doing this in my opinion) and Chem doesn't have anything related to it for what its worth.
I still have to go read chemistry though. But I don't know why but something in this video genuinely clicked chemistry for me where I could watch a 100 videos like this (although the point can be that I am now doing it out of my own free will and not a rigorous syllabus with tests and rewards/punishments systems basically)
Sorry for the yap, just wanted to get it off my chest. I have nothing against chem as a subject tho, I am sure that its interesting and this video sorts of proves it but I feel like I am more inclined towards software engineering but it sucks that I have to study chem to go do what I actually want in life (which requires a degree for maximal benefit which requires good marks aka a decent/huge focus on chem as well right now)
> But cheers for showing support to high quality science content on YT. Appreciation is a great instinct to nurture.
Thanks! I appreciate it, Have a nice day!
(Also edit once again) but I want to touch on the reason why I feel appreciating it even more so is because a single guy is able to compete against (essentially) a 200 Billion $ GIANT.
Such levels of individual freedom and achievements should be celebrated by the society just for the sake of it (and in this case we can see some other benefits as well as I told in the initial comment)
They empower Individual youth and Individuals in general and its very empowering. Generally the same reason I love Open source as well. Bringing real change to the world and leaving a fingerprint on Humanity I suppose. Even small things like these provide me and maybe others hope against darkness created by system of corruption being witnessed most around the world and monopolization/ big businesses doing shady practices most often.
So full disclosure, I haven't watched the video, and I've already seen some couple comments since I always take a brief scan before I do.
That being said: The thing about soda that most people get wrong is the level of fizz. Nothing is comparable to commercial soda just based off that. So, when you start off from a lower level baseline of "your fizz" < "their fizz", and add in recipe differences...well, it'll be a fun watch, regardless.
Small edit on this: They used a soda stream, which definitely doesn't add as much carbonation as commercial equipment does. Based only upon that, the taste profile will end up different for most, and despite all the science involved, it will lead to the over use of other flavors to compensate. Respectable try, however. He should sell premixed stuff on his website, although I imagine that is a regulatory nightmare, given that some of the stuff he used isn't food grade.
They didn't use soda stream, I don't know what made you think that... They just used regular old bottled carbonated water.
This is a good alternative to redirect profits from a billion dollar company, but it still leaves the problem of selling a diabetes-causing, tooth-decaying addictive substance.
if you watch to the end, he provides his final recipe, with the caveat that making the batch the first time will be pretty expensive, and also make sure you have good safety gear on sicne some of the ingredients are dangerous when not diluted.
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wow, this is by far the most random "orange man bad" I ever saw.
Huh there is so much limonene in Coca Cola?! Limonene works as a very good…pesticide and herbicide! I did a research project on limonene like 10 years ago with my mentor and it outperformed most commercial pesticides in controlled settings. It really can't be that great to ingest.
It's also anti-inflammatory and an antioxidant, and you can get it either by eating citrus fruits or in pills as supplements.
There's a lot of things that aren't great for you at one quantity but are better or necessary at another.
As they say, the most dangerous thing in the ocean is the water.
One grape can kill a dog, does that mean it must be harmful for me to ingest?