Coke Just Revolutionized Coke

0:00 In my last video about Mexican Coke,

0:02 I made an incredibly bold claim: Mexican Coke is a lie.

0:05 This bottle that I tested at the beginning of the video contained,

0:08 from what I can tell, zero sucrose in it.

0:10 And that led me here, which led me here.

0:13 And I discovered something that Coke is doing that they haven't told anyone.

0:19 (mellow music) -This is the American Coke?

0:24 -Correct.

0:24 Okay.

0:25 That's not what I expected to see.

0:27 And Coke is not telling anyone about this.

0:29 They're keeping it as secret as the federal government will let them.

0:33 It doesn't even say it anywhere.

0:35 It says, yeah, it says...

0:35 In my first video, I tested Mexican Coke with a blood

0:39 glucose meter and a more than century-old chemical reaction.

0:43 And based on those results, I claimed that Mexican Coke has no actual sucrose,

0:48 also known as sugar, in the bottle,

0:51 despite saying cane sugar right here on the label.

0:53 That was an aggressive claim,

0:55 especially because I never actually measured the sucrose.

0:59 I only measured glucose.

1:01 So two chemistry professors decided to call me on it.

1:04 This is Jeb and John.

1:06 They're both professors at Shippensburg University.

1:08 And what they did is they hired an undergrad,

1:10 this is Rebekah, to attempt to replicate my results.

1:14 She used this machine.

1:15 It's a high-performance liquid chromatograph.

1:17 Everyone in chemistry just calls it an HPLC.

1:20 Rebekah bought several samples each of Mexican and American Coke.

1:23 She sonicated them to get rid of all the carbonation,

1:25 and then she filtered them, and then she ran them on the HPLC.

1:29 The data this machine spits out looks like this.

1:32 It's called a chromatogram.

1:33 The x-axis is time and the y-axis is millivolts,

1:37 but you can just think of it as concentration.

1:39 Now, each of these peaks that you're seeing represents a single chemical.

1:44 And you know which peak is which because before you ran your actual samples,

1:47 you ran pure compounds, and you saw how long each of those took to elute.

1:51 Elute, that's a good word.

1:54 And the area under each peak is proportional

1:56 to the amount of each of those chemicals.

1:59 With the same amount of sucrose, glucose, and fructose,

2:01 the sucrose peak would be visibly larger- -I see.

2:04 -than a glucose peak.

2:05 And the glucose peak would be visibly larger than the fructose peak.

2:08 [George] Now, in my creepy basement,

2:09 the best I could do was to sort of semiquantitatively measure only glucose.

2:13 But this HPLC can measure all three sugars

2:16 at the same time with much higher precision and accuracy.

2:20 Now, look at these two chromatograms.

2:22 One of them is American Coke and the other is Mexican Coke.

2:25 And if you wanna pause the video here and guess which is which,

2:28 please do that right now, because I'm about to tell you that the one

2:31 with the larger fructose peak is the American Coke,

2:34 which makes sense because it's sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.

2:38 In other words, corn syrup that has more fructose than glucose.

2:40 So you would expect a larger fructose peak.

2:43 Black line is Mexican Coke and pink line is American Coke.

2:47 [Rebekah] Yes.

2:48 Nailed it.

2:49 Now, this is the Mexican Coke, and as you can see,

2:50 the fructose and glucose peaks are basically equal in size, more or less,

2:54 because all the sugar in the Mexican Coke started out as sucrose,

2:59 which is one unit of glucose bonded to one unit of fructose,

3:03 so you get equal amounts of fructose and glucose.

3:06 The bottles of Mexican Coke that Rebekah tested had

3:10 on average 2.8 grams per liter of sucrose left in them.

3:14 So in these bottles of Mexican Coke,

3:17 97% of the cane sugar had been destroyed by the acid.

3:22 In other words, in my first video,

3:25 I was 97% right, which I'll take, I'll take that.

3:28 The next interesting question is how long does

3:31 it take for 97% of the sucrose to disappear?

3:34 And does that mean that any bottle of Mexican

3:36 Coke you buy will have no sucrose in it?

3:39 Now, to really answer this question,

3:40 you need a bottle of Mexican Coke in which the reaction hasn't started yet.

3:43 You need freshly bottled Mexican Coke.

3:45 That's a problem, because if Mexican Coke really and truly is made in Mexico,

3:49 then it would take at least a few days to get up here to Pennsylvania,

3:52 by which time it might be too late to get the measurements you need.

3:56 So the team found a local soda company,

3:58 Reading Soda Works, that was about an hour away.

4:01 And they bought a bottle of freshly bottled

4:03 sarsaparilla soda that was sweetened with cane sugar,

4:06 and they ran it on the HPLC.

4:09 And they were doing this as a baseline,

4:10 basically to figure out how much sucrose had been hydrolyzed.

4:14 And they found that basically none of it had: none of it.

4:18 So they tested the pH of the sarsaparilla soda,

4:21 and they found that it was about 4.6.

4:23 That is 1.85 units higher than Mexican Coke, which is way down at 2.75.

4:29 So that means that Mexican Coke has almost

4:31 100 times more acid than the sarsaparilla soda.

4:37 Hang on.

4:37 Is that right?

4:38 I think that's right,

4:39 'cause you do 10 to the 4.6 or 10 to the minus 4.6 or something?

4:44 Sorry, 71 times more acid than the sarsaparilla soda.

4:47 Okay, it's not a hundred.

4:48 So then the team did something that I think is super clever.

4:53 They took this sarsaparilla soda and they added hydrochloric acid

4:57 to it to get it down to a pH of 2.75;

5:01 in other words, matching the pH of the Mexican Coke.

5:04 And then they split it up into three batches

5:07 and they stored it at three different temperatures: three Celsius,

5:10 which is about the temperature of your fridge; 22 Celsius,

5:13 which is roughly room temperature; and 39 Celsius,

5:16 the temperature of a hot summer day.

5:18 And they followed all three batches for three weeks.

5:22 And after just 14 days at 39 Celsius, all the sucrose was gone.

5:30 All of it, even at room temperature.

5:33 After just three weeks, that's an additional one week,

5:36 almost half the sucrose had hydrolyzed.

5:40 This is not the shocking thing that Coke is doing,

5:42 but it did make me wonder if the Mexican Coke you

5:45 buy at the store contains a 50/50 mixture of fructose and glucose,

5:50 and the American Coke you buy at the store contains

5:52 those same two sugars but in a slightly different proportion,

5:57 55 and 42%, is this very subtle difference really what

6:01 people are tasting when they distinguish between American and Mexican Coke?

6:06 This was a big question in my first video.

6:09 Now, I had a hunch that the answer was no.

6:11 So I brought a sample of pure high-fructose corn

6:14 syrup to Jeb and John's lab, and we ran it.

6:17 Look at this chromatogram.

6:18 All right, so these are the fructose and glucose peaks.

6:21 They are, as you'd expect, the fructose peak is higher,

6:23 and this right here is a little tiny sucrose peak.

6:26 But what is this?

6:29 This small peak at 5.825 minutes.

6:33 Now, as soon as we saw this, we went back

6:35 and looked carefully at the chromatograms of Mexican Coke and American Coke,

6:39 and we confirmed that, yeah,

6:41 this tiny little peak is present in American Coke but not in Mexican Coke.

6:49 So my interpretation of this is that there is something,

6:52 probably a sugar, in American Coke that is not present in Mexican Coke.

6:58 [Jeb] Yeah.

6:59 Now, the The amount isn't large, but it's detectable.

7:03 But like this is at a concentration

7:05 that is well above taste thresholds, like- -Probably.

7:08 -Depending on what this is and what the actual taste threshold is,

7:12 you could probably taste this.

7:14 -Possibly.

7:15 -Possibly.

7:16 Back in 2014, during the initial Mexican Coke wars,

7:20 a group of scientists from the International

7:23 Society of Beverage Technologists published this paper:

7:26 and this paper contains a chromatogram

7:28 of a soft drink sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.

7:32 And there are actually multiple peaks that come off before the glucose,

7:36 which they identify as maltose, maltotriose, and maltotetraose.

7:41 Now, those are fancy names; all they are is two,

7:43 three, and four glucose subunits joined together respectively.

7:47 Now, it's possible that this peak right

7:50 here that we found in our high-fructose corn

7:52 syrup is maltose or maltotetraose or even

7:56 a mixture of all of these glucose oligomers, or some other higher-order sugar.

8:01 In my last video about Coke, I glibly dismissed the idea that anyone

8:06 could taste the difference between sugars.

8:08 But what about everybody who claims they can specifically taste

8:11 the difference between cane sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in a soda?

8:15 Those people are just wrong.

8:17 Yeah, it turns out I might be wrong (laughs).

8:20 Yeah.

8:21 Here's the deal.

8:22 We are gonna run a taste test in this video that will help answer that question,

8:26 a taste test that it would not have been possible for anyone to run before now.

8:33 The night before we got to Shippensburg,

8:35 Jeb found this bottle in a store in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

8:40 This is a holiday-edition American Coke, except it's made with cane sugar.

8:45 This is the holy grail.

8:47 It's the thing that started the Coke wars.

8:49 It's American Coke with cane sugar and no other differences.

8:54 It's not Mexican Coke with this double the sodium and who knows whatever else.

8:58 Obviously, Jeb bought a couple of bottles,

9:01 and we immediately threw it on the HPLC.

9:03 Now, we were all expecting to see

9:05 basically the same chromatogram as Mexican Coke:

9:07 complete inversion, complete hydrolysis of the sucrose.

9:11 But that is not what we saw.

9:12 Look at this massive sucrose peak.

9:14 There is still roughly 64 grams per liter

9:18 of the original cane sugar left in this bottle.

9:21 And so now we have to rewrite this whole video.

9:24 From a sugar standpoint, this Coke is nothing like Mexican Coke.

9:28 So either this is not very old or it was kept at a very cold temperature.

9:33 Yeah.

9:35 I can actually do the math, if you want me to.

9:37 Yeah, let's do the math.

9:38 So based...

9:40 -Oh, I'll be back.

9:41 -Okay.

9:41 Yeah, I'll be back.

9:42 Yeah.

9:42 That's the best kind of math, when somebody else does it for you (laughs).

9:47 What I get, based off the idea that it

9:48 was stored at room temperature the whole entire time,

9:50 was that it was only bottled 21 days ago.

9:53 They could market this as different.

9:55 Because if I were to consume this versus a regular American Coke,

9:58 I would've had a different sugar profile experience.

10:02 You know what I mean?

10:03 Coke did something very special here.

10:05 They gave us a soda that has the low pH that we've come to expect from Coke,

10:09 gives us the bite and the burn,

10:10 but it also has most of the intact cane sugar left in the bottle.

10:17 It's mostly a cane sugar soda.

10:22 Coke has not done this before.

10:24 This is an achievement.

10:28 And who did they tell about this achievement?

10:31 No one!

10:36 They didn't tell anyone.

10:37 It doesn't even say it anywhere.

10:38 Yeah, you have to look to find that it's cane sugar.

10:42 That's mine.

10:42 Look, nowhere on this bottle does it say cane sugar or real sugar or any

10:48 of the other marketing terms that other

10:51 companies fall all over themselves to tell you.

10:53 The only place on the entire packaging where you

10:57 will see cane sugar is in the ingredients label,

11:00 which Coke is required by law to disclose.

11:04 This is the Coke that allows us to run a taste

11:07 test that we have never been able to run before,

11:09 which is American Coke with cane sugar

11:13 versus American Coke with high-fructose corn syrup.

11:18 Can people taste the difference?

11:21 At the same time, I was also struggling to figure out what is Coke up to here?

11:26 Have they lost their minds?

11:29 Do they know something we don't know?

11:32 And I don't know anything about marketing,

11:36 economics, companies, or really capitalism,

11:38 so I found some people who know more about economics than I do.

11:41 Let's go.

11:42 I broke into NPR headquarters and tracked down two of the hosts

11:45 of "Planet Money." Could I have you guys close your eyes?

11:47 -Sure.

11:47 -We did some taste tests.

11:49 -Taste all three.

11:50 -Okay.

11:50 Think about whether or not one of them is different from the other two,

11:55 and if so, which one?

11:56 Okay.

11:57 I think number three is different.

11:58 -Vote locked.

11:59 -(buzzer beeping) It's maybe a little less sweet, -number three.

12:01 -I agree.

12:02 No, no.

12:02 Maybe one.

12:03 -One.

12:03 I think one is...

12:04 -(buzzer beeping) -Oh my God.

12:05 -Oh my God.

12:06 Maybe one and two are less sweet and three is sweeter.

12:09 Okay.

12:10 Three is sweeter.

12:10 Jeff's now named all of them.

12:12 [George] And they disabused me of some of my conspiratorial thinking.

12:15 What better marketing than the president of the United States saying,

12:18 "Go buy some cane sugar Coke." Yeah.

12:21 Yeah.

12:21 And that feels a lot less conspiracy theory and more like what

12:24 a company would try and do if they were on their game.

12:27 A rapacious, profit-maximizing company that wants

12:30 to sell as much sugar water as possible.

12:32 Yes, exactly.

12:33 US cane sugar prices are just artificially high.

12:37 You could always count on cane sugar being more expensive, to some degree.

12:40 And so high-fructose corn syrup could sort of always sneak

12:43 in under The amount of sugar in a can of Coke,

12:46 if it's high-fructose corn syrup, it costs wholesale maybe 4 cents.

12:50 You're looking at 4 cents of sugar.

12:51 Wow.

12:52 Okay, that's lower than I expected.

12:55 And if that were cane sugar,

12:56 at the current spot price, that would be 4.70 cents.

13:01 And then multiplied by however many bajillion cans that Coke sells,

13:05 like, it makes a difference.

13:07 And then I wanted to see if they could taste

13:09 the difference between cane sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in American Coke.

13:13 So now we are tasting Coca-Cola products.

13:16 I think they're all the same, George.

13:17 -(buzzer beeping) -Take a bunch of...

13:18 Number one is sweeter to me.

13:20 -Okay.

13:21 -Well, okay.

13:21 He had a one in three chance of getting it right.

13:23 No, no, you have to test Kenny again right now and see if he can replicate.

13:27 Absolutely not.

13:27 I refuse.

13:28 [George] So we tested Kenny again.

13:31 Oh no.

13:32 I think this was the cane sugar.

13:33 -Nailed it.

13:33 You're right.

13:34 -(gasps) What?

13:35 You nailed it.

13:36 Kenny, are you a supertaster?

13:38 -Maybe.

13:38 -And we tested Kenny again.

13:40 I think it's this one.

13:41 -So you're actually wrong.

13:42 -(buzzer beeping) -It was the middle one.

13:43 -No!

13:43 -No!

13:44 -Yeah.

13:44 -I'm not a super– -Nooooo.

13:46 That was a fluke.

13:47 That was a fluke.

13:47 I don't think so.

13:48 I think it's really hard to tell the difference.

13:50 And yes, obviously, Jeff and Kenny are

13:52 very far from making a statistically significant sample.

13:55 But this is what I think of these very limited results.

13:58 Jeff and I got it wrong.

14:00 I think the one to my furthest left is cane sugar,

14:03 and the other two are high-fructose corn syrup.

14:05 -No.

14:05 -(buzzer beeping) [George] Kenny tried it three times and got it right twice.

14:09 Should I quit this job and go become a sommelier?

14:11 [George] So maybe there are some people

14:13 whose taste buds really can detect this difference.

14:16 And maybe all of them commented on my last video.