Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0
1 day ago
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
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.
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.
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