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.
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
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained