Fanta-type drinks are very popular with Latinos and will often be seen for sale at every grocery/convenience store in places with a lot of Latinos. So, maybe not the Midwest.
Acsenray is an expert in this field while I just read the newspaper, but I believe these things can be patented. But patents are public so they don’t want to reveal their secret process by filing a patent.
I believe there is another area of IP law called trade secrets but I don’t know how that works or whether it applies here.
Yeah, plenty of fruit-flavored sodas here (in Chicago.) I would say Orange Fanta or similar is a standard fountain drink. I generally expect a cola, a diet cola, a lemonade, a ginger ale, maybe a Mt.Dew or Dr. Pepper type of product, and a fruit soda.
Essentially, it’s far easier to hide your recipe in a safe and prosecute for trespassing and theft than it would be to deal with it fully as intellectual property.
There’s a famous story about how Pepsi reported someone who wanted to leak the Coke recipe to them. The major players know that there is no upside to espionage – if Pepsi can get a hold of Coke then Generic Bottler can get a hold of Pepsi the same way. They want to disincentivize this behavior. As a result, there probably aren’t a lot of Coke-financed burglars staging Mission Impossible-type heists at Pepsi HQ, or vice versa.
This brings up an interesting marketing question: If you want to compete with some major well-entrenched product, should your strategy be to make a near-clone of it (by which you hope, at least, to grab some of the original product’s market share), or do you develop a new distinctive product, just similar enough to compete in the same market niche?
Case in point: Del Taco vs. Taco Bell. I, for one, really don’t care for Taco Bell food. (I’ll refrain from giving a lurid description of how much I don’t care for it, as that is off-topic here.) But there was a time when I had never sampled Del Taco. So one day, I wondered if it was just a Taco Bell clone or if it might be something rather different (and hopefully better). So I went there to give it a try.
Ugh. Taco Bell clone, as far as I could tell. Not the Pepsi strategy, I guess.
Of course, trade secrets in theory don’t require any legal protection. A company protects it’s trade secrets by simply (or not so simply) keeping their secrets, y’know, secret.
Hence (to give a not-so-simple example), that story that I linked in the OP about Coke keeping their recipe in secure boxes at various banks, until finally they built their own vault at their own headquarters to store it. (See pic at the link in the OP.)
(Interestingly, that vault is a tourist attraction. The pic shows the vault wide open, with cordons around it to keep the throngs of tourists in line, and no doubt lots of security guards and high-tech electronic security whiz-bangs all around.)
If you want secret:
That dollar bill in your wallet is printed on linen (the red and blue squiggles are thread).
Try finding out who makes it and where.
The closest I’ve heard is that the factory in in PA.
But yeah, have your suppliers ship the stuff in unmarked containers (and buy stuff that you just throw away, in case somebody finds out that the warehouse actually is yours), process separately (emulsify the orange oil in a different shop than the lemon oil) and generally play a shell game with ingredients.
Where does the syrup for Coke come from?
p.s. - I’d give even money that the Chinese have copied Coke down to the last drop
Crane & Co. in Massachusetts makes nearly all US currency paper and has since the 1880s. According to their web site that I found with a quick Google search (because I didn’t quite trust my memory of the name), they’re quite proud of it.
Oh, wait… did you say that was a secret? My bad. 
Midwestern here and in our household we drink: orange, grape, strawberry and Squirt plus diet pepsi, Mt Dew and its various flavors and a tiny bit of regular pepsi. There’s also the half lemonade/half tea that makes a nice change from carbonated beverages.
When I was wee girl Nehi Orange was my second favorite pop with A&W Root Beer coming in first. Nowadays it’s ice water, hot or cold mint tea and diet pepsi (yuck… but now and then I want a mixed drink).
I find Del Taco to be quite different. I don’t like Taco Bell, even judging it on its own merits (yes, I understand it’s not supposed to be authentic Mexican food or anything like that). I just never developed a taste for it, and I try it once every year or two to see if my opinion has changed and, so far, it hasn’t. Del Taco, on the other hand, especially their fish tacos are fantastic. Unfortunately, the one location we had in the Chicago area only lasted for a short while. They have surprisingly good burgers, too.
This question can get complicated in a very silly way, but very broadly speaking recipes that use known tools, processes, and ingredients can’t be patented.
It is possible however for a novel tool, process, or ingredient to be patented—“novel” meaning it had never existed before. Not just that it hadn’t appeared in this kind of recipe before.
Legal protections do come into play when you want to get damages for or enjoin misappropriation.
But, yes, one of the things that a court will ask is whether you took reasonable measures to protect your purported secret.
Recipes can be trade secrets. They have to meet all the other requirements of a trade secret—information generally unknown to your competitors that gives you a commercial advantage over them.
Of course, if they simply find out on their own—rather than stealing the secret from you—you’re out of luck, simply because it’s no longer a secret.
Patents also are only good for 20 years (it used to be 17). Any patent on Coke or KFC chicken would have run out years and years ago.
Not only that but in order to get a patent you must disclose your secret. So once that has happened, trade secrets law doesn’t help you.
A classic of what can bee patented is the eraser on the end of your pencil.
That was originally issued a patent. The patent was revoked because it did not have a patentable content or process.
The pencil had existed, the rubber eraser had existed, and the process by which the two were joined had existed.
The ball-point pen was another issue - the patent was valid, but instantly violated on a truly massive scale.
Of course the real question is “are the secret recipes even being used”? We all know Coke replaced sugar with HFCS in the 1980s, so it’s not the exact original recipe anyway. Who knows if the other ingredients got replaced or altered over the years too? As Poundstone noted in the KFC chapter, original KFC recipe gravy was replaced with an easier to make (and worse tasting) method, so who’s to say if the original “11 herbs and spices” got omitted over time?
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Did everybody here read Poundstone? If you haven’t do it now. Several entertaining books, well-researched, but lacking Cecil’s edge.
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Even he is wrong about Coca-Cola. It’s orange, not lime.
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The only Coke clone I found that came close to duplicating the original was Jolt. Most other brands seem to think caramel coloring and sweetness is what makes a cola.
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I have the dregs of a bottle of apple soda in arm’s reach. It’s Manzanita del Sol–our Mexican-American neighbors really like fruit sodas. And, if Family Guy contains any truth (Cleveland subscribes to Grape Soda Monthly, IIRC), so do our African-American neighbors. The apple soda tastes good, but it is so cloying!
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I see KFC mashed potatoes (once described by the Colonel as “wallpaper paste” before they started keeping their spokesman on a shorter leash) now come in sulfited and unsulfited forms, depending, making eating them a game of Russian Roulette for me.
Yes, Coca-Cola could go to a lot of trouble to ship ingredients in unmarked containers, and rotate who they buy from, and so on, but why would they? Coke doesn’t care if anyone else figures out their secret. It’s completely irrelevant to them.
Now, what they do care about is that the masses think it’s a secret, because that’s a cornerstone of their advertising. But you don’t need to go to nearly as draconian measures to accomplish that.
This is why Ted Kennedy spent his Senate career blocking any switch from $1 bills to $1 coins. I mean, that’s not all he did as a Senator, but it was one thing. I suspect Elizabeth Warren isn’t about to encourage it either.
Except for regulatory agencies around the world. Otherwise, a secret ingredient could be cocaine. Again.
I doubt any KFC spices, the formula for Coke and countless other “secrets” aren’t known to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for instance, though I suppose a freedom-of-information demand by Joe Public would be rejected.
The quantity of each “secret” ingredient in a given foodstuff might not be required by regulatory agencies, depending on the country. On the other hand, energy drinks come repeatedly under fire for the quantities of their ingredients. Any regulation of those would include quantities.
I don’t know about other countries, but the FDC Act doesn’t require every ingredient of every edible product to be filed with the government. I’m pretty sure that unless there’s a reason for the FDA to investigate a company, then ordinarily if the label says “natural and artificial flavors,” then the FDA doesn’t have anymore detail than that on record.