Guess you actually can’t beat the true thing.
Coca-Cola gets its iconic taste thanks partly to a chemical processing factory in a sleepy Latest Jersey neighborhood that has the country’s only license to import the plant used to make cocaine.
The Maywood-based facility, now managed by the Stepan Company, has been processing coca leaves for the soft-drink giant for greater than a century and had its license to import them renewed by the Drug Enforcement Agency earlier this 12 months.
The coca leaves are used to create a “decocainized” ingredient for the soda and the leftover byproduct is sold to the opioid manufacturing company Mallinckrodt, which uses the powder to make a numbing agent for dentists, DailyMail reported.
It’s unclear how much coca leaves the Stepan Company imports annually, although the Latest York Times reported in 1988 that it brought in between 56 and 588 metric tons of coca leaves from Peru and Bolivia annually, citing DEA figures.
The Stepan Company in Maywood, Latest Jersey, has the country’s only license to import bulk shipments of coca leaves, that are used to make cocaine. Getty Images/iStockphoto
One ton of coca leaf costs over $5,500 in Peru, so the Stepan Company can be paying between $308,000 and $3.2 million for the shipment of the illicit leaves if the quantity it imports has remained constant over the many years, in line with data from agricultural company Selina Wamucii.
Ricardo Cortés, creator of 2012’s “A Secret History of Coffee, Coca and Cola,” wrote that he obtained records from the National Company of the Coca, a Peruvian state-owned company, which showed that as much as 104 tons of coca leaves were exported to Maywood annually between 2007 and 2010.
Importing coca leaves was banned in 1921, however the laws left an exemption for Maywood Chemical Works, which ran the factory before Stepan Company bought the positioning in 1959.
The plant in Maywood has been processing coca leaves for Coca-Cola for greater than a century. Jeffrey Greenberg/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Meanwhile, the legal exemption the factory has received helped the Coca-Cola brand to change into the huge globally recognized company it now’s, with is value around $265 billion.
“Coca-Cola’s success because the mega-company it’s today is due, not less than partly, to special privileges granted by government during World War II, and the suppression of potential competitors within the early years of Harry Anslinger’s anti-drug policies,” Australian economics think tank Mises Institute wrote in a 2016 article.
Anslinger was the previous head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics between 1930 and 1962 and is widely known as an early proponent of the war on drugs who had a significant role within the federal criminalization of marijuana.
The Stepan Company processes the coca leaves to flavor Coca-Cola.Google Earth
Cortés wrote in a 2016 blog post that he visited the National Archives and saw letters between Anslinger and Maywood Chemical Works joining forces to deflect a Life Magazine reporter’s story concerning the coca leaf importation.
“We don’t desire the publicity which such an article might bring us,” Maywood Chemical’s President M.J. Hartung wrote to Anslinger in 1949.
The subsequent 12 months, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics filed an internal memo regarding the matter.
“Less publicity of articles about coca leaves and narcotic drugs can be higher for the general public,” the memo from July 1950 reads, occurring to call past coverage of the difficulty unsatisfactory.
