Exactly 125 years ago yesterday, an Atlanta pharmacist mixed up a cure for headache and fatigue and stumbled upon the recipe for what has become one of the world’s most recognizable drinks and brand names.
Yesterday, Coca Cola celebrated the moment when on May 8, 1886, John Pemberton made his way into US culture, creating a soft drink now sold in more than 200 countries and earning the company a place among the world’s top 100 firms.
Regular Coke, as opposed to its numerous offshoots, such as Diet Coke, remains the world’s favorite soft drink, with a whopping 17 percent market share, trouncing its rival Pepsi.
The recipe is a closely guarded secret passed down through the generations, and according to legend safely stashed away in a company vault.
“The Coca Cola saga has been reverentially preserved and nurtured over the years,” writes author Mark Pendergrast in his book For God, Country and Coca-Cola, which relates the history of the drink.
The official version of events in this rags-to-riches story “has all the earmarks of the class American success myth.”
According to the legend that has grown up around Coke, the poor but kindly Pemberton was transformed from a dishwasher into a millionaire.
However, in reality Pemberton was no grumpy, herbal doctor who unwittingly brewed up his magic potion in his backyard, Pendergrast maintains.
Coca-Cola was a typical by-product of “the golden age of quackery” at the end of the 1800s when many doctors were trying to patent all kinds of cures and medicines for a variety of ailments.
Pharmacists and quacks offered their wares for sale on every street corner amid a growing clamor in the developing industrial age for effective cure-alls at the infancy of modern medicine.
The original Coca Cola most likely tasted different from the liquid today, Pendergrast says: “It was like many such other nostrums, a patent medicine with a distinct cocaine kick.”
Pemberton is thought to have discovered his new “miracle” medicine on May 8, 1886, and dubbed it Coca-Cola, but at the start, the public eschewed his marvelous new elixir and in the first year he only sold on average nine glasses a day.
It was in 1888 that business began to bubble when entrepreneur Asa Chandler bought the rights and began to mass-produce this “medicine” as a refreshing soft drink.
Within just a few years, Coca-Cola was a favorite beverage around the US. The brew only made it across the Atlantic and into Europe in 1919, when it first appeared on shelves in France, before arriving in Germany in 1929.
However, apart from its business success, Coca-Cola is above all a cultural phenomenon.
It remains one of the world’s favorite drinks despite concerns over its sugar content, amid rising obesity levels, especially among children.
Last year, the company had a net revenue of about US$35 billion, leading to profits of almost US$12 billion.
Selling more of the soft drink to children would be a “public health disaster,” says Michael Jacobson from the Center for Science in the Public Interest lobby group.
However, it is hard to defeat such nimble marketing and overturn a brand image that has turned Coke, which its distinctive red and white label, from a mere consumer product into an object of desire, argues Constance Hays in her book The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company.
“Through relentless advertising, clever marketing and sometimes plain old luck, Coke came to stand for the glamorous, prosperous, flag-waving side of America, the part that always looked forward, not back,” she writes.
And the secret recipe? That remains firmly under lock and key even if some people claim to have already discovered the right ingredients.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six