Ben Gilbert

They've got this bottle thing.

They had another issue where there was a federal regulator who thought caffeine was evil, so they appeased him by cutting the caffeine content down by two-thirds.

It makes it so you can consume a lot more Coca-Cola.

Right.

And it was a complicated little period because some of the kids did want to have this happen.

Other ones didn't want to have it happen.

They're sort of family infighting.

But ultimately, after a few years...

Ernest Woodruff and his syndicate of investors do own and control the company.

In fact, there was some clever financial engineering that had to happen to buy this company.

Like $25 million in 1919 is a huge amount of money.

And so as a result, this is actually the first time the secret formula for Coca-Cola gets written down.

It had been sort of this cool secret before, but as collateral for the loan that Woodruff took out to complete this transaction, they wrote down the formula and placed it in a vault at the Guarantee Bank of New York.

Mmm.

Because that's where they got the capital from.

And so they get to hold the formula as collateral.

Prior to this, it had always been verbal.

The system Asa Candler set up was insane.

So this is from the book Secret Formula about Asa and his son, Howard Candler.

Asa made his son memorize the contents of the various containers that were stored carefully in a locked room with their labels peeled or scratched off.