The Coca-Cola Vault: Where the Secret Formula Is Kept, and How It Got There

The written Coca-Cola formula is kept in a purpose-built vault at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta. It moved there on 8 December 2011, after six years as loan collateral in New York and 86 years in an Atlanta bank vault. Here’s the paper trail, and what you can and can’t see.

The Coca-Cola vault at a glance

The vault is one of nine in our tour of the world’s strangest vaults. This page follows the formula itself, bank by bank.¹²

The formula and why it was never patented

Pemberton sold the first glasses of his drink at Jacobs Pharmacy in Atlanta in 1886.³ According to the company, the formula was kept secret, shared only with a small group and never written down. Asa Candler bought out the business in the early 1890s (the company’s own pages give both 1891 and 1892 as the year he became sole proprietor).¹⁴ Under Candler, Frederick Allen writes, trusted workers scratched the names off the ingredient containers and relabelled them as numbered “merchandises”. One of them was the flavouring blend known as 7X.⁵

Why lock a recipe in a vault rather than patent it? Because a patent means publishing the invention. Allen puts it plainly: trademark law protects the name and the logo, but the formula couldn’t be patented without being disclosed.⁵ A trade secret has the opposite deal. It’s protected only for as long as it really stays secret, which is why the company’s efforts to guard it matter in law as well as in marketing.⁶ The company’s own line today is short: “The formula for making Coca-Cola is a trade secret.”⁷

That’s the thread that runs through the rest of this story. A safe or a vault is what turns “we don’t tell anyone” into something a court will recognise as reasonable care.

1919 to 1925: a formula as loan collateral

In 1919 the Candler family sold the Coca-Cola Company for $25 million to a consortium led by the Atlanta businessman Ernest Woodruff.³ Woodruff’s bank, the Trust Company of Georgia, underwrote the company’s first publicly traded shares that year, a deal that left the bank holding what would become more than 48 million Coca-Cola shares.⁸

The company’s version of what happened to the recipe goes like this. To finance the purchase, Woodruff arranged a loan and offered the secret formula as collateral. He asked Candler’s son to write it down, and the paper went into a vault at the Guaranty Bank in New York, where it stayed until the loan was repaid in 1925.⁴¹

Allen, who wrote a history of the company called Secret Formula, tells it a little differently. In his account it was a chemist, W. P. Heath, who learned the formula from the Candlers and wrote it down, and the borrowing came after the First World War, when a sugar shortage nearly wrecked the soft drink trade and Coca-Cola borrowed millions from New York banks. The collateral, he says, was the written formula folded into a blue envelope.⁵ We couldn’t settle which hand held the pen. Both accounts agree on the bit that matters here: from 1919 the formula existed on paper, and that paper lived in a New York bank vault until 1925.

It’s a nice irony. A recipe that had never been written down because writing it down was too risky ended up as a banker’s security, valued precisely because it was secret.

86 years in an Atlanta bank vault

Once the loan was paid off in 1925, the formula came home to Atlanta and went into the Trust Company Bank, as the company calls it, later SunTrust.⁴ The company credits Ernest Woodruff with reclaiming it; Allen says it was his son Robert, who had become president of Coca-Cola in 1923, who brought the envelope back, had it sealed with wax and put it in a vault in the bank’s basement.⁴⁵³

The bank’s own story is older than its famous lodger. It began in 1891 as the Commercial Travelers’ Savings Bank, became the Trust Company of Georgia two years later, and had Ernest Woodruff as president from 1904 and chairman from 1922. It merged with SunBanks of Florida in 1985 and was trading as SunTrust by 1995.⁸ Through all those name changes the formula stayed put. When SunTrust merged with BB&T in December 2019 to form Truist, the encyclopedia notes, it had still held the only written copy of the original formula in a vault at its main office in Atlanta, a statement that only fits the years up to the 2011 move.⁸

Timeline

• 1886 John Pemberton’s drink is first sold at Jacobs Pharmacy, Atlanta.³
• 1891–1892 Asa Candler becomes sole proprietor.¹⁴
• 1919 Sale to Ernest Woodruff’s group for $25 million; the formula is written down and pledged as collateral in New York.³⁴
• 1925 Loan repaid; the formula moves to the Trust Company in Atlanta.⁴
• 1979 An Atlanta newspaper column prints a recipe said to be the original.⁹
• 1985 A federal court in Delaware orders the formulae produced in a bottlers’ lawsuit.¹⁰
• 2011 On 8 December the formula goes on show at the World of Coca-Cola.¹
• 2019 SunTrust merges with BB&T to form Truist.⁸

Was it really a safe deposit box?

It’s often called the world’s most famous safe deposit box, and the idea fits: a private item, a bank vault, and an owner who wasn’t the bank. But the sources we read are careful with the word. The company says “vault”, the Associated Press says “vault”, Allen says a basement vault, and in 1985 the court was told the only written record was “kept in a security vault at the Trust Company Bank”.⁴²⁵¹⁰ We found no first-hand source that describes a rented box with a renter’s key, so we’ll call it what they do.

What the court was told about access is the interesting part. The vault, the company said, “can only be opened upon a resolution from the Company’s Board of Directors”.¹⁰ That’s the same principle as an ordinary box at a bank, where neither the customer nor the bank can open it alone. If you’ve found an old key and want to know how that arrangement works in practice, our guide to safe deposit box keys explains it, and the strongroom around the boxes is covered in how bank vaults work.

Bank vaults were a point of pride in those years. The year before the formula came to Atlanta, the York Safe and Lock Company was advertising vault entrances ten feet thick for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which you can see in our 1924 York Vaults advert. We don’t know who built the Trust Company’s basement vault; we couldn’t find it named anywhere.

The 2011 move to the World of Coca-Cola

On 8 December 2011 the company moved the formula from SunTrust to a new permanent exhibit, the Vault of the Secret Formula, as the capstone of its 125th anniversary year. It was the first time the vault holding the formula had been visible to the public.¹ A few days before the unveiling, chief executive Muhtar Kent placed a metal box, which the company says holds the formula, inside a five-foot-high safe and locked it; a video of that moment was shown at the launch.²

Coca-Cola said the move had nothing to do with SunTrust’s decision, from 2007, to start selling its long-held Coca-Cola shares. A bank spokesman said SunTrust had been honoured to look after the formula.² American Banker was less sentimental: it called the move more publicity stunt than material change, and a sign of how the old ties between the drinks company and its bank were loosening.¹¹ The new vault is only several blocks from the old one.¹¹

Inside the Vault of the Secret Formula

You walk past a room of historical displays and into a round room with a giant metal-clad vault, fitted with a keypad and a hand-print scanner. A railing keeps you several feet back. The vault never opens, and when the Associated Press asked whether the keypad and scanner were real security or decoration, Coca-Cola wouldn’t say.² As a piece of design it’s pure bank-vault theatre: polished steel, a spoked handle, bolt bars and hinges the size of drainpipes.

The exhibit around it was designed and developed by Second Story Interactive Studios with several partners: twelve media installations that build to a finale at the “huge vault door”, with a guide character in a hat inspired by Slugworth from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.¹² The company lists a virtual “Taste Maker” where you try to recreate the flavour, a Myths and Legends quiz, and a game in which you help protect the secret by visiting places where the formula has been kept.⁴

The attraction’s own page still invites you to “see the real vault where the secret formula is kept”.¹³ The paper itself, of course, you don’t see. Nobody outside the company can check that the box holds what the company says it holds, which is rather the point.

It’s one of a small group of vaults built to be looked at rather than opened. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is another, and there the public doesn’t get in at all. Our list of famous safes and the legends around them has more objects whose story is bigger than their steel.

Who knows the recipe? Legend and record

The best-known piece of Coca-Cola lore is that only two people know the formula at any one time, and that they never fly on the same plane. It isn’t just lore. In a 1985 opinion, Chief Judge Murray Schwartz of the federal court in Delaware recorded the company’s own evidence: the formula was “known by only two persons within The Coca-Cola Company”, the company wouldn’t name them, and it wouldn’t allow them to fly on the same aeroplane at the same time.¹⁰ Allen traces the rule to Robert Woodruff, who limited the knowledge to two senior chemists.⁵

That case is also the closest anyone has come to forcing the secret out. Bottlers sued over the syrup used for diet Coke, and the judge ordered the company to produce the complete formulae, including the secret ingredients, under a protective order.¹⁰ According to a summary of the 1986 ruling that followed, Coca-Cola wrote to the court that it would not produce them, citing the “overriding commercial importance of… secrecy”, and asked for a hearing on sanctions instead.¹⁴ We couldn’t read the full 1986 opinion, so we can’t tell you exactly what the court did next.

Today the company is vaguer. Its consumer FAQ says only that “a few people in the world” know the formula, and when This American Life asked in 2011, the show reported that the company no longer discusses how many people know it.¹⁵¹⁶ Ira Glass also pointed out the obvious flaw in the plane rule: if the written formula is in a vault anyway, it doesn’t much matter who’s on which flight.¹⁶

The 1979 recipe and This American Life

In 2011 the radio show This American Life said it had probably found the original recipe, printed on 18 February 1979 in an inside page of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. The show stressed it wasn’t claiming this was the recipe used today.⁹ The 1979 column was based on a handwritten pharmacist’s recipe book said to have belonged to R. R. Evans, a friend of Pemberton’s. The historian Mark Pendergrast told the show it was “certainly a version of the formula”, while Coca-Cola’s archivist Phil Mooney said, “quite frankly I don’t think so.”¹⁶ Allen, writing the same month, called the idea that the formula had appeared in the paper unnoticed “simply absurd” and argued that the 1880s recipe differs a lot from the 1919 formula in the vault.⁵

Other famous recipe vaults

Coca-Cola isn’t the only company to lock a recipe in steel and tell the world about it. In September 2008 KFC said Colonel Harland Sanders’ handwritten Original Recipe of 11 herbs and spices, created in 1940, had been kept in a safe for 68 years. While the company upgraded its security, a former New York detective, Bo Dietl, moved it from the Louisville headquarters to an undisclosed location in an armoured car with Brink’s and the Louisville police, the recipe in a locked briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.¹⁷

The rules sound familiar. KFC said two executives knew the recipe, a third knew the safe’s combination, and the three weren’t allowed to travel on the same plane or in the same car.¹⁷ An analyst quoted in the same release said that having a secret recipe is “priceless”. On the evidence of both companies, so is having a vault to keep it in, preferably one people can come and look at. If you’re wondering where a vault ends and a safe begins, our guide to the difference between a vault and a safe sets it out.

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