Coca Cola Manufacturing

The Coca-Cola Company (KO) is the world’s largest beverage company, and it owns or licenses more than 500 nonalcoholic beverage brands. The company owns four of the world’s top five nonalcoholic sparkling beverage brands: Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Fanta and Sprite. The prototype Coca-Cola recipe was formulated at the Eagle Drug and Chemical Company, a drugstore in Columbus, Georgia, by John Pemberton, originally as a coca wine called Pemberton’s French Wine Coca. He may have been inspired by the formidable success of Vin Mariani, a European coca wine.

In 1886, when Atlanta and Fulton County passed prohibition legislation, Pemberton responded by developing Coca-Cola, essentially a nonalcoholic version of French Wine Coca. When launched, Coca-Cola’s two key ingredients were cocaine and caffeine. The cocaine was derived from the coca leaf and the caffeine from kola nut, leading to the name Coca-Cola (the “K” in Kola was replaced with a “C” for marketing purposes). Coca – cocaine Pemberton called for five ounces of coca leaf per gallon of syrup, a significant dose; in 1891, Candler claimed his formula (altered extensively from Pemberton’s original) contained only a tenth of this amount.

Coca-Cola once contained an estimated nine milligrams of cocaine per glass. In 1903, it was removed. After 1904, instead of using fresh leaves, Coca-Cola started using “spent” leaves – the leftovers of the cocaine-extraction process with trace levels of cocaine. Coca-Cola now uses a cocaine-free coca leaf extract prepared at a Stepan Company plant in Maywood, New Jersey. In the United States, the Stepan Company is the only manufacturing plant authorized by the Federal Government to import and process the coca plant, which it obtains mainly from Peru and, to a lesser extent, Bolivia.

Kola nuts – caffeine Kola nuts act as a flavoring and the source of caffeine in Coca-Cola. Kola nuts contain about 2. 0 to 3. 5% caffeine, are of bitter flavor and are commonly used in cola soft drinks. In 1911, the U. S. government initiated United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola, hoping to force Coca-Cola to remove caffeine from its formula. The case was decided in favor of Coca-Cola. Subsequently, in 1912, the U. S. Pure Food and Drug Act was amended, adding caffeine to the list of “habit-forming” and deleterious” substances which must be listed on a product’s label. Coca-Cola contains 34 mg of caffeine per 12 fluid ounces (9. 8 mg per 100 ml). How is the most widely recognized product in the world made? How are the required quality standards met for every single unit of that product? Coca-Cola’s bottlers and canners are concerned with a range of processes involved in transforming resources into the bottles and cans of drink that we are familiar with. The transforming resources are the managers, employees, machinery and equipment used by The Coca-Cola Company and its franchisees.

Primarily, Coca-Cola is manufactured by franchisees who are the world’s leading bottling and canning companies. This franchise business is strictly controlled by The Coca-Cola Company. The production of Coca-Cola involves two major operations: 1) Creating the packaging material 2) Bottling and canning the finished drink For many years, Coca-Cola was produced in glass bottles. Because of the high cost of distributing bulky bottles, they had to be manufactured close to where the bottling took place. Today, this is no longer so important since new packaging methods have revolutionized the process.

Advanced bottling and canning technology makes Coca-Cola cans and bottles very light but extremely strong. The Company has invested a lot of time and money in research and development to ensure the most effective life cycle impact of its packaging. By using the minimum quantities of materials in packaging, the cans and plastic bottles are simple to crush or to reprocess at the end of the initial life cycle. Cans are delivered in bulk to a canning plant. At this stage the cans are shaped like an open cup ready to receive the liquid drink.

They are not fully formed because the ring pull end has still to be fitted. After they have been inspected to check that there are no faults, each can goes through a rinsing machine to make sure it is clean and ready for filling. Coca-Cola consists of a concentrated beverage base and a liquid sweetener which are combined to form the syrup from which the drink is made. The Company ships the concentrate to bottling and canning plants where the franchisees mix it with sugar and local water. The water is passed through a number of filters to make sure it is absolutely pure.

Carbon dioxide, which makes it fizzy, is also delivered to the canning plant where it is stored and then piped into the manufacturing process through a carbonator and cooler. The Company specifies what equipment franchisees will use to carry out these processes. Samples are taken regularly for chemical analysis, and staves make frequent spot checks to ensure that plants are maintaining the Company’s standards of cleanliness and quality. The Company provides its franchisees with the most up-to-date technology available and many of them use the latest computer technology and statistical process control methods.

The packaging and the finished drink are combined by a rapid filling process. Every minute hundreds of cans pass along an automated production line and are filled with a precise amount of Coca-Cola. As the cans move along the production line, they are seamed to include the ring pull end and produce the finished can. The ends are inspected to make sure they are smooth and do not have any gaps or leaks. An individual code is stamped on the cans so that each one can be traced back to the point and time of production. A date code ensures product freshness.

The manufacture of Coca-Cola is carried out by a set of processes called continuous flow production. On a production line, a process is continually repeated and identical products go through the same sequence of operations. Continuous flow production takes this one step further by using computer-controlled automatic equipment to produce goods 24 hours a day. Throughout the production process, quality control personnel monitor the product and take test samples. To guarantee that there are no errors, quality control inspectors take statistically selected samples at the end of the production line.

Using chemical analysis, these inspectors can guarantee that the product meets the exact specifications; they also check that there are no faults in the packaging. A ‘fill height detector’ uses an electronic eye to ensure that the cans are filled to the right quantity. Cans that are not properly filled are rejected. The canners then prepare the cans for distribution to retailers such as supermarkets, shops and garages. A machine called a case former creates the casing that protects the cans as they are sorted onto pallets.

The cans are stored temporarily in a warehouse before they are collected by large distribution trucks. The bottling process, whether in glass or PET (plastic), is very similar. Each plastic bottle starts as test-tube size and is blown up like a balloon into the final bottle shape. Whereas franchisees receive cans that already have the logo and any promotional details on them, bottlers apply the labels from large reels once the bottles have been formed. At the end of the bottling line, bottles are automatically sealed with a cap immediately after they have been filled.