Coca-Cola History: From 5-Cent Tonic to the New Coke Fiasco

The history of Coca-Cola from John Pemberton's Atlanta soda-fountain tonic in 1886 to the New Coke disaster of 1985, and why Americans felt they owned a soft drink. In the spring of 1985, the Coca-Cola Company changed the recipe of the best-selling soft drink on earth. Seventy-nine days later, after a revolt by its own customers, it brought the old one back. The company had not made the change on a whim. Coca-Cola began as a patent tonic that sold about nine glasses a day, and became the most widely recognised product on earth. Most people remember New Coke as a dumb mistake; the company's own taste tests said it was a winner, and the real lesson of 1985 is what those tests could not measure. CHAPTERS 0:00 Seventy-Nine Days 2:48 A Tonic for the Nerves 7:07 The Man Who Bought It for $2,300 12:34 A Bottle You Could Know in the Dark 17:25 Every Man in Uniform 20:56 The Other Guy 25:18 The Real Thing SOURCES Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It (1993; 3rd ed. 2013) Frederick Allen, Secret Formula: How Brilliant Marketing and Relentless Salesmanship Made Coca-Cola the Best-Known Product in the World (1994) Constance L. Hays, The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company (2004) Thomas Oliver, The Real Coke, the Real Story (1986) Roger Enrico and Jesse Kornbluth, The Other Guy Blinked: How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars (1986) The New York Times, coverage of New Coke and the return of Coca-Cola Classic, April-July 1985 Bartow J. Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (2015) Where the sources disagree, the narration says so. Illustrations are artistic reconstructions created with AI tools; narration voice is synthetic. #businesshistory #documentary #economics