How are "secret recipe" food/drinks manufactured?

One reads discussions from time to time about some trademarked food or beverage product, the recipe for which is held by the company as a heavily guarded super secret.

Two well-known examples are the “Eleven Herbs and Spices” of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the Coca-Cola recipe.

Here is an article I just noticed about the Coke recipe (which is what inspires this thread). It mentions the super-secret recipe, and the history of the various secure vaults in which it has been kept, and the company’s clusterfucked attempt to change the recipe 30 years ago. The article also questions how many people there are in the world who know the recipe: Allegedly just one or two, maybe.

I’ve read similar things about the KFC recipe.

My question: These are mass produced products, sold in vast quantities world-wide. How is the manufacturing process managed to produce all of that (in multiple plants around the world, I gather) without anybody knowing the recipe beyond a few corporate top dogs?

(ETA: Yes, I know you can google for those recipes and find umpteen sites purporting to reveal the secret recipes, which I suppose are all of questionable authenticity.)

A recipe is a matter of both ingredients and proportions (as well as cooking methods).

So if you’ve got a secret recipe for a spice mix, you buy your spices separately and ship them to a processing center. You have the processing center repackage the spices into generic containers and ship them to a kitchen. You tell the kitchen “Mix five pounds of the stuff in barrel #1 with four pounds of the stuff in barrel #2 and half a pound of the stuff in barrel #3. Then ship it to the franchises.” You can split this up among separate processing centers and kitchens so nobody works with all of the ingredients.

You tell the franchises “When you’re making a batch of chicken, add a tablespoon of mixture A, two teaspoons of mixture B, and one teaspoon of mixture C.”

So nobody but the guys at the top knows all the pieces to the recipe.

You’d think the people at all those processing stations would talk to one another, so that at least some of those details would get spread around. Even if the exact contents of Barrels A, B, and C aren’t known (and one would think those could easily be figured out), the proportions and cooking instructions couldn’t be kept secret, could they?

Processing centers, not processing stations. No reason to think that people working at a processing center in upstate NY will talk to or even know anyone in a processing center outside Minneapolis. Assuming that either one of them even knows they are working on the KFC recipe to begin with.

Yeah, and they might source their onion powder/pepper/cayenne mixture “A” from a place in Minnesota, and their salt/MSG/garlic powder/thyme/paprika mixture “B” from a place in San Antonio, whose products get sent to one of several processing facilities that produce 55 lb sacks of “The Colonel’s Breading Mix” for the franchisees.

So no individual franchisee is going to know the formula, and neither will the processing centers or the spice blenders. Just the people who are entrusted with the formula, and possibly the purchasing people, if they’re stupid and have the same people spec out the mixture “A” and mixture “B” (for example). You could have purchasing people in different offices spec that stuff out and add another layer of obfuscation.

But yeah, this stuff is relatively easily determined through stuff like gas-chromatography/mass-spectrometry, but I suspect the Devil is really in the manufacturing details; just knowing the 11 herbs and spices may not do you much good if there’s a step in producing KFC chicken that is hard to duplicate for some reason.

It’s getting a little long in the tooth, but Poundstone’s “Big Secrets” (the first one) goes into great detail about both the Coke and KFC formulas, and their histories, and both fact and shrewd guesses about how they are compounded and distributed.

In the case of KFC, it’s a lot more about the cooking process (using pressure cookers, a very high starting temperature and a quickly lowered cooking temp) than the coating… which is flour, milk, salt, pepper and MSG. No herbs at all.

Well, there’s more to it than that, as (PDF ahead) their ingredients list states, but the cooking method is the real signature of KFC. (ETA: Actually, it’s only the crispy chicken ingredients list that shows other flavors. The original chicken just hides it under “colonel’s secret original recipe seasoning”, which I guess could just be MSG and pepper.)

It’s all pretty bland, commercial-cooking stuff and additives except for the fan-dance of that “seasoning,” which could be nothing more than the salt and pepper Poundstone found. There isn’t really anything to prevent a company from adding things to the list - e.g. “spices,” meaning anything from “there was an open jar of oregano in the corner of the compounding room” to “two pinches of parsley in a one-ton batch” to, well, secret spices that don’t show up on a qualitative analysis.

Recipes, foods, beverages, and products are not protected by trademark law.

A name of such a product (or slogan or symbol, etc.)—that is, the mark under which it is traded—might be protected under trademark law.

The real reason the formula is secret is that no one really cares. If you knew the secret formula of Coke there is nothing you could with it. You could manufacture a clone drink but it would not have the marketing machine behind it like Coke does. If people want to buy a beverage that tastes exactly like Coke, they would just buy a Coke.

Which was Poundstone’s quoted argument (and repeated/stated by others) as to why Pepsi, then #2 by a wide margin, didn’t just reformulate to taste like Coke.

Being able to duplicate Coke’s unique nuances would be of value to the Shasta and Fanta and other low-tier bottlers, though. (I know these and others are now subsidiaries of MegaCoke and UltraPepsiCo now, but once upon a time, kids…)

I suspect that it’s more the market positioning of Shasta/Faygo/whatever cheap soda (Fanta is actually owned by Coca-Cola, BTW) that makes them cheap, not a lack of a palatable flavoring. Plus, the marketing onslaught and hype tend to reinforce that significantly.

I mean, you could easily come up with something that tasted identical to Coke, or whatever, and market it as a value brand, and there’s a significant portion of the buying public that wouldn’t buy it because it’s a value brand. Look at beer; some of the value brands are actually objectively better tasting and cheaper than Budweiser/Miller/Coors in the same category, but due to market position and marketing muscle, are drastically outsold. PBR and Schlitz are a couple of beers that fall into that category that I know of (4 stars on Beer Advocate vs. 3 for the big 3 macrobrews), and both are cheaper by the 12 pack of cans. But a LOT of people won’t buy Schlitz or PBR because they’re “cheap beer” and they don’t drink “cheap beer”.

There are lots of store brands that taste pretty close to Pepsi, and a few that are pretty close to Coke, and I imagine people who shop at the same store all the time, and have one of those stores as their go-to, and really like cola enough to buy 12-packs every time they grocery shop, do in fact buy them.

For those of us who use multiple stores, or avoid buying cases of soda at a time because always having it in the fridge isn’t healthy, or want a single bottle from 7-11 or a vending machine, knowing that Coke will always taste like Coke is worth the miniscule price difference. Even at the bulk pricing, it’s not like the difference between a case of Coke and a case of store-brand soda is $100. It’s more like $2. For most people, spending $2 a week to not have to worry about which store brand tasted right the last time and which tasted like stale diet RC is a perfectly rational expenditure.

Not as much as you’d think. Small, regional bottlers have done an excellent job of knocking off Coke, Pepsi and 7-Up for generations. When Mr. Pibb was first introduced, it was a virtual clone of Dr. Pepper. It never got anywhere near the Dr’s. market share, however, even with Coke’s marketing clout behind it. Eventually it was reformulated to have a little more kick.

bump:

Niptick: Fanta is a Coca-Cola company product.

Around here, those are all the same price. 12 pack 12 oz bottles of both Schlitz and Bud are $8.99 at the local Binny’s (our regional mega liquor mart.) PBR is slightly cheaper at $8.49. For a little while a few years back, when Schlitz reformulated back to their old formula or something close to it, Schlitz was more expensive than the Buds. The reason I remember this is that I’m a big fan of the “new old Schlitz” and it seemed odd to me they positioned themselves for at least a time in between the macro beers and the crafts in terms of pricing. PBR has also had the young 20-something cachet for awhile (I suppose you can call it “hipster” if you want.) Most people I know in my age group (I just turned 40) seem to consider PBR as more desirable than BudMillCoors, but that could very much be a regional thing. I agree though that brand recognition and marketing put the macros way ahead of sales, though.

Which is why Amateur Barbarian’s next sentence was:

Part of the reason Fanta isn’t as hugely popular in the U.S. as it is elsewhere is that anyone can make a fruit drink, and store brands as well as the national knockoff brands already own that market. To make pineapple or lime soda, you put pineapple or lime flavor in soda. It’s not like Coke or Dr Pepper that can only be described as tasting like Coke or Dr Pepper.

Cartoonacy:

But Fanta was ALWAYS a Coca-Cola product. It was invented by the Coca-Cola company, not a separate company acquired after the fact.

How popular really are fruit flavored sodas today? For a long time, maybe until the 1980s, 7Up was right up there with Coke and Pepsi. And in the '30s and '40s I suspect that people thought there was grape juice in Nehi or orange juice in Crush.

Maybe it’s a Midwestern thing, but I never see anyone drinking fruit soda (with the exception of Sprite) as a fountain drink, and seldom see anyone buying it in the grocery.