Ben Gilbert

Is there a product that I can make that people can afford anytime they want that's not a medicine, that's just a refreshment, and has all these other great properties using some of the ingredients that we've been using?

So he kind of comes up with this idea of a five-cent, again, because the ingredients cost so little, these extracts, it's a super high-margin product, a five-cent thing that anybody can have just to have a little pick-me-up, a little treat when they're at the soda fountain.

When they're sitting down in the social gathering space, because drugstores at that time were sort of the Starbucks of this time.

It really was this gathering place to go and spend time.

And so he says, I'm going to serve this other market of anytime refreshment.

And so he's playing around with these ingredients.

And he's got the cola seed that's got this natural caffeine in it.

Fun story, in the original Coca-Cola, for the first, I don't know, a couple decades, it actually had four times the amount of caffeine that Coke does today.

So it was effectively an energy drink, even leaving the cocaine aside.

However, the cola seed, it tastes really bitter.

It's absolutely horrible, which was not a big deal previously because he was mixing it with wine.

People were drinking it for medicinal purposes, just kind of slugging it down.

But he's trying to create a refreshing beverage here.

And so I did not know that this was possible way back in 1886, but what he does is he uses synthetic caffeine.

Merck, the pharmaceutical company, had already been extracting pure caffeine from cola seeds.

So Pemberton just got a hold of Merck and bought a bunch of the powder.

And so the first version of Coca-Cola is...

A little tiny bit of the cola seed, just kind of to say that it's in there.

He's going to call this thing Coca-Cola.

But the caffeine actually comes from a synthetic extract.