The Strange History of Coca-Cola

This was the beginning of this book, because I was doing that. I was looking at all the ingredients that go into Coca-Cola and saying, okay, what's in the drink, first of all? Because it's from my hometown, that's where it started. I said, okay, I want to find out all these natural resources in the product. And, you know, is Coca in the drink? And also caffeine, we'll get to that. That's how it comes to Monsanto. But Coca was the most interesting actually, because I thought, you know, it's called Coca-Cola. So does it have cocaine in it? And so I went back to look at that and it turns out, yeah, you know, trace amounts back then. Still? In the beginning. No, no, no. In the beginning. Yeah, but this is what's interesting about the history of the drink. So this is 1886. Back then, the coca leaf was actually seen as something that was- Medicinal. Medicinal, you know? In all of us. Absolutely. And everyone was using the coca leaf. I mean, there was a drink called Vind Mariani. It was actually a wine, a red wine that was mixed with coca leaves. So it kind of had a little kick to it. And like Queen Victoria of England drank this stuff. Ulysses S. Grant, our president, was like, whoo, you know, coca wine. This is awesome. And even the Pope, actually. I wonder if communion would have had, you know, Vind Mariani. We would all be Catholic or something. But so it was really popular. And this guy, this guy was down on his luck, John Pemberton, who started Coca-Cola in Atlanta. He wanted to make a coca drink himself. And so he made this, originally, coca was actually a wine. It was like a wine of coca. It was a red wine mixed with coca leaves. Exact knockoff of that drink that was really popular. And then prohibition hits Atlanta because we're in the Protestant South in the 1880s. And so he has to take out the alcohol. And so he creates this non-alcoholic drink, Coca-Cola, that has the coca leaf in it. They weren't concerned about the coca. They were concerned about alcohol. And it remained in the drink throughout the 20th century and the 20th century. What kind of dose would it have in it? Very small, you know. And this, I think, is important. You know, people equate the coca leaf with, you know, cocaine because, yes, you can make cocaine, like street cocaine, from, you know, processing all these coca leaves. But if you go to Peru today or you go to certain parts of South America, people chew coca leaves, it's a normal practice. It's been going back thousands of years to the Inca even. And so it's very small amounts we're not talking about. Like, in fact, you'd probably get a bigger hit from like, you know, experience from a cup of espresso from Starbucks. But interestingly, the reason that cocaine became taboo and why it got pulled from the drink had nothing to do with national laws in the country, which was so interesting when I was studying it. It had everything to do with racism, actually, in the South because there was a concern that cocaine was contributing to black crime in Atlanta, which was being, of course, blown up by segregationists and white supremacists. And Asa Candler, who was a white guy in Atlanta, didn't want to have anything to do with that. So he decides kind of quietly to take out the cocaine. But here's the interesting thing, Joe. They kept the coca leaf as one of their secret ingredients. Yeah. So secret ingredient number five, by the way, Coke doesn't like talking about this. This is not part of their history that they like discussing. But it's clear as day in the archives. You can see it. So it's called merchandise number five, the fifth secret ingredient in Coca-Cola. And- I like the name. Isn't it merchandise number five? Well, the whole idea is that you name things so that no one asks questions, right? What's merchandise number five? Also, that ingredient includes a little bit of the cola nut. Which is from West Africa, actually. And it was originally in there because it has caffeine, another kind of caffeine kick. That's where Coca-Cola comes from. But cola, by the way, is with a K, the actual cola nut. Anyway, that's merchandise number five. And it's basically the flavor of the coca leaf, the essence of the coca leaf. And the way it works is these leaves are brought in from Peru is actually where Coca-Cola sourced it. And that was crazy. I had to track down, okay, where are they getting their coca leaves from? And there's this company called Maywood Chemical Company. Today, the company's called Steppen Chemical Company. Is that in New Jersey? It is in New Jersey, exactly. Maywood, New Jersey. Yeah, they're the ones who process it and they make medical grade cocaine out of it and then use the flavor aspect of it for Coca-Cola. Exactly. And, you know, technically, at first, as you put it, most of the cocaine was going for pharmaceutical uses and for, you know- Blidocaine. All sorts of things like that. They're used for legitimate purposes. But Coke needed actually so much flavoring. Think about their brand, it's so big. Like wheatgrass juice. We squeeze a lot to get a cup. So they had to like come up with this special, I love it. You can't make this stuff up. This is why history is fun. There's a special exemption in our laws for what are called special leaves from Peru. And if anybody looking at it saying, well, what the hell are these special leaves, you know? And they're special because they're allowed to come into the United States exclusively, basically, to create the flavoring extract for Coca-Cola. A lot of people call it the Coca-Cola Joker. How closely do you think they monitor that supply? You know what I mean? Very closely. They even have to. Yeah. Like if a bundle or two fell off a truck here or there, that could be extremely profitable. Right, I talked to somebody once, they said, so is there like a pile of cocaine somewhere up in New Jersey, you know, where this is happening and I don't think that's the case. But here's the crazy part too. This is what's fun about tracing these stories of ingredients because they lead you to places you never thought you'd go like this book, which we'll talk about. But it got weird. If that's not weird, it got weird in the 60s because Coca-Cola wanted to figure out a way to make coca leaves in the United States to grow their own coca leaves. They weren't satisfied with this trade with Peru. And these are declassified DEA documents at the National Archives. This is not like, you know, yeah, something crazy. You can see it and actually it's in the book. But basically they petition the federal government to start growing it. At first they're thinking like the Virgin Islands, but then they're like, I don't know. There's like all these tourists, it's gonna be crazy. But they have to find a climate and a location geography where they can do this. And they ultimately go, okay, what about Hawaii? And they do, Joe. They grew coca leaves secretly, a totally secret operation called the Alakea Project. Also called Alakea. What does that mean? Exactly. Nobody's gonna ask questions, you know, obfuscate the story. In Kauai. Oh, wow. And it was done through the University of Hawaii. They had to sign all these non-disclosure agreements and they wouldn't publish their papers, you know, on the study of all this. The reason the government agreed to it is that Coke said, we're gonna create a cocaine-less coca shrub. Like basically breed a plant that doesn't have cocaine in it. And of course, that never really transpires, but they do end up growing secretly behind barbed wire fences, coca leaves for Coca-Cola in the 60s. But I'm an environmental historian, so I study the relationship between like businesses and the environment. And in this case, the environment matters because nature bit back. So in the 60s, this fungus that's native to Hawaii was like, whoa, this plant that's not native and attacks it. And it wipes out the entire coca crop of Coca-Cola. So that this supply they had for a very brief time in the 60s is wiped out. They go back to sourcing it from Peru. Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.