Project Kansas AKA New Coke

Welcome to the Paranoid Style Podcast! This episode is sweet, effervescent, and will not rot your teeth… because this week we are discussing The Kansas Project, a top-secret, world-wide plan to usher in the New World Order of beverages… New Coke! The biggest marketing failure of all time. Or was it??  From cocaine to kola nuts, sugar cane to high fructose Frankenstein. This episode is passing the Pepsi taste challenge! 

Please subscribe where ever you get your podcasts. If you have any topic suggestions for the show or any tales to share, please email us at theparanoidstylepod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram @theparanoidstylepod or on twitter @style_paranoid.  

Music used in this episode is from: Purple Planet Royalty Free Music.

Opening theme music provided by Tony Molina. You can hear more of his music at https://tonymolina650.bandcamp.com/

Transcript

CCK: Hey Sister.

ARK: Hey Sister.

CCK: Welcome to the Paranoid Style Podcast!  I'm Christine and I have a betta fish named Signore Funfetti.

ARK:  I'm Amanda and I…   …Follow us on Instagram at theparanoidstylepod and feel free to slide into our DMs if you have any questions, comments or topic suggestions for the podcast! 

CCK: Amanda, tell me what you know about Project Kansas.

ARK: Project Kansas? Was that the one where the US was looking to build spacecraft powered by atomic bombs?

CCK: That was Project Orion.

ARK: Was it the one where they created tiny drones painted like dragonflies and equipped with audio sensors?

CCK: That was Project Insectothopter.

ARK: Oh, that makes sense.  Was it the one where the US military was investigating sightings of green fireballs in the sky?

CCK: That was Project Twinkle. Project Kansas was the code name for one of the deepest, darkest and most refreshing conspiracies on Earth, the creation and distribution of New Coke.

ARK: It may seem odd to do an entire episode on a soft drink, but in April 2021, the DIRECTV provider, USDIRECT compiled a state-by-state study of conspiracy theory popularity by looking at conspiracy posts on reddit and analyzing google trends. New Coke was the most frequently searched conspiracy in five states, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Washington DC. And there's not just one strand in the New Coke conspiracy but at least four.  Was the release of New Coke just an elaborate marketing ploy to increase sales for original coke?  Was it a distraction to hide the fact that sugar was being replaced with corn syrup as the sweetener when coke classic was brought back 79 days after the release of new coke? Or was it a ploy to allow for removal of "coca" from the name on the can and transition to coke without causing an uproar? Maybe most scandalously of all, was New Coke a truly delicious beverage that won out in blind taste tests over both original coke and pepsi and it was simply torpedoed by nostalgia? 

CCK: Before we crack open a can of answers to those bubbling questions, let's dive into the history of Coca Cola.

ARK:  I will slap you. 

CCK: Don't worry, I'm out of beverage related puns, please don't can me it would be soda pressing! <SLAP NOISE> I deserved that.

ARK: Dr. John Stith Pemberton was a medical doctor and biochemist who had received his medical degree from the Reform Medical School of Georgia in 1850.  He initially practiced medicine and surgery, but later opened a pharmacy in Columbus, Georgia being more interested in the chemistry side of things. In April of 1865, one month before the end of the civil war, the Union led a final campaign through Alabama and Georgia known as Wilson's raid, the point of which was to destroy Columbus, a major Confederate manufacturing center.  Fighting on the confederate side as part of the Third Calvary Battalion of the Georgia State guard, Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Pemberton received a sabre wound to the chest. This wound would lead to a morphine addiction and for the rest of his life he would experiment with various painkillers to find an alternative to morphine. 

CCK: His first morphine alternative was called, "Dr. Tuggle's Compound Syrup of Globe Flower".  The active ingredient in Dr. Tuggle's syrup was buttonbush, a bitter tasting fruit which was used by North American Native tribes to treat a range of ailments including dysentery, fevers, and toothaches. In large doses the leaves of the plant could be toxic. 

ARK: Pemberton's next brew was French Wine Coca, which was a combination of two plants and French wine.  The first plant was damiana, an herb native to southern Texas, Mexico and Central America. According to the Damiana Liqueur website, Mexican Margarita folklore says that the very first margarita ever "was made with Diamana, not that silly French Liqueur, triple sec."  Damiana has a flavor somewhat like chamomile and was used in folk medicine to treat coughs, depression, low energy and was considered by some to be an aphrodisiac. The other ingredient was coca, a plant native to western South America known mostly in the United States for the mind-altering alkaloid that can be synthesized from it, cocaine. French Wine Coca was marketed as a medicine and was advertised as especially beneficial for "ladies, and all those whose sedentary employment causes nervous prostration."  

CCK: In a major blow to French Wine Coca, in 1886, parts of Georgia enacted temperance legislation to restrict the sale and distribution of alcoholic drinks so Dr. Pemberton had to remove that pesky alcohol from his brew, and sub in some delicious Kola nut instead for flavor and caffeine. Kola nuts are the seeds of the kola tree, an evergreen tree about 20 meters high, with long, pointed, leathery green leaves and cream-colored star shaped flowers.  Coca Cola was introduced to the world in Atlanta Georgia on May 8, 1886 when Dr. Pemberton walked into Jacob's Pharmacy with a jug of his invention. Willis E. Venable who owned the soda fountain in the pharmacy took a sip and after some tinkering, they put it on sale for five cents a glass, mixed with carbonated water, as a soda fountain drink and a medicine.  

ARK:  An early iteration of the label on the bottles of syrup read:  This intellectual beverage and temperance drink contains valuable tonic and nerve stimulant properties of the coca plant and the Cola nuts and makes not only a delicious, exhilarating, refreshing and invigorating beverage but a valuable Brain Tonic and a cure for all nervous affections – Sick Head-Ache, Neuralgia, Hysteria, Melancholy, etc. The peculiar flavor of Coca-Cola delights every palate. 

CCK: And here I thought it just went great with popcorn!

ARK: Dr. Pemberton's partner and bookeeper, Frank M. Robinson, came up with the name Coca-Cola as he thought, "the two C's would look well in the advertising". 

CCK: Kola as in the kola nut is actually spelled with a K but who am I to stand in the way of alliteration.

ARK: Robinson also came up with the distinctive script used in the logo.  Pemberton ran newspaper ads in the Atlanta Journal and put up handpainted oil cloth signs on store awnings for Coca-Cola. By 1887 they were selling 600 gallons of syrup a month.  During this time, Pemberton, who was unfortunately slipping farther into his morphine addiction, sold off portions of his soda business, and would die penniless of stomach cancer in 1888. His only child, a son named, Charley, owned a few remaining pieces of the Coca-Cola brand, but Charley was also an opium addict and died only six years after his father. Asa G. Candler, an Atlanta businessman and marketing wizard saw the potential in the drink and by 1889 had acquired complete control of the business including name and brand and the magic formula for cocaine jug sludge for somewhere around twenty-three hundred dollars. 

CCK: And now a note on the coca part of that cola.  Cocaine is made from the coca leaf but it requires the cocaine hydrochloride alkaloid in the leaf to be extracted and concentrated.  Coca leaf in leaf form has been chewed and used as tea among the indigenous peoples of the Andean region for centuries. When chewed, coca is a mild stimulant that suppresses hunger, thirst, pain, fatigue and helps stave off altitude sickness.  The Coca-Cola company denies that anything other than the flavoring was ever used in the soda, in 1959 the president of the company stated that the name had been picked as a “meaningless but fanciful name.”  But there is some historical evidence that cocaine was present in small amounts in Pemberton’s original concoction. Pemberton’s notes stated that each gallon of syrup called for five ounces of coca leaves, which would result in about 4.5 milligrams of cocaine per serving. Ten to 30 mg of cocaine would be considered a low dose, but still…cocaine…Whatever was in there, by 1903 Coca-Cola figured out how to remove most of the psychoactive component from the coca leaf by using spent coca leaves that had the cocaine hydrochloride already extracted and in 1929 they learned how to remove the cocaine alkaloid completely from the coca extract used in the beverage and just keep that peculiarly delightful coca flavor. The extracted cocaine was sold to a medical company that used it to make a topical anesthetic for surgeries on the eyes, nose and mouth, but this cocaine solution is not much used anymore because there are more effective alternatives.

ARK: Candler expanded distribution of the Coca-Cola syrup concentrate to soda fountains outside of Atlanta, though Atlanta to this day is still the location of the headquarters of the company. Candler promoted the drink by giving away free vouchers for samples and provided soda fountains and pharmacies selling the drink items bearing Coca-Cola branding, such as calendars, clocks, mirrors and matchbooks. By 1895, Candler had syrup factories in Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In 1899, Candler basically gave away the right to bottle the soda to Benjamin Franklin Thomas and Joseph Brown Whitehead with the stipulation that they must purchase and use x amount of Coca-Cola Company provided syrup per bottle and be able to satisfy demand throughout the United States.  Candler didn’t think bottled beverages would ever take off, but Thomas and Whitehead believed selling the soda outside of soda fountains would create a huge market. The distinctive coca cola bottle was created in 1916 to distinguish the soda from the many imitators that had popped up and the slogan at the time urged consumers to "demand the genuine." But one disturbing note on bottled soda, the early 1900’s were the pinnacle of food poisoning in America, and Candler sold the coca cola syrup to bottlers, but the bottlers that Thomas and Whitehead contracted with were independent and of varying levels of competence.  Since bottles were continuously washed and reused, and had rather small openings and were filled with sticky sweet soda, they frequently went back out with bugs, worms, slugs, roaches, slime and the occasional cigarette butt that had not been washed out before soda was added back in. Also, consistent bottling of carbonation was still a hit or miss proposition and resulted in best worse case, flat soda and worst worse case, exploding bottles.

CCK: By 1919, Coca-Cola bottling distributers began distributing bottles as “Six-packs”, that people could take home to… GAG…enjoy. During World War II demand for the soda by Americans overseas led Coca Cola to build bottling plants in Europe.  In 1919, Edward Woodruff purchased the company from Asa Candler for $25million dollars, giving Candler a 10,000% return on his original investment.  Also in 1919, the Coca Cola Company went public and is now owned by shareholders and investors. The largest current shareholder, with about 9.5% of the total stock is Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway group. The net income for Coca Cola in 2020 was 7 billion dollars and they are the world’s largest producer of non-alcoholic beverages, selling over 500 products in 200 countries.  They have around 900 bottling and syrup manufacturing facilities around the globe and they are also the world’s largest plastic polluter, responsible for over 2.9 million tons of plastic waste per year.  

ARK: So, how did new coke even happen?  In a company that had used the slogans, “Demand the Genuine” in 1916, “It’s the real thing” in 1969 and “Coke is it!” in 1982 to describe their flagship product, what would make them consider changing the formula for the drink they’d been successfully selling by the giant plastic bucketful for a century?

CCK: Well to explain that, we should talk a little bit about Roberto Goizueta who was the CEO of the Coca Cola Company for 16 years from 1981 until he died from lung cancer in 1997. Much of the information in this section is based on the 2013 unauthorized biography of the Coca-Cola Company called, “For God, Country and Coca Cola” by Mark Pendergrast.

ARK: Goizueta was born in Havana on November 18, 1931 to a wealthy family with a booming sugar cane business in Cuba.  He came to America in 1948 for his senior year of high school at the Cheshire Academy in Connecticut. He spoke very little English when he arrived, but by the end of that school year he had taught himself English by watching American movies and was the Valedictorian of his class.  He went on to graduate 10th in his class at Yale in 1953 with a degree in Chemical Engineering.  Back in Havana after graduating, Goizueta had bucked tradition by not working in the family sugarcane business and instead had answered a help wanted ad for a position in a Cuban Coca Cola bottling plant.  In a brief time, he had been promoted to chief technical director of five coca cola bottling plants. When his family fled the Castro regime take over of Cuba in 1959 and came to the US, Goizueta took a job as a quality assurance engineer with the Coca Cola company in Miami. By the age of 35, he had become Vice President of Technical Research and Development, the youngest person ever to hold that position with the company. 

CCK: Goizueta was tapped to take over as CEO for Paul Austin by none other than Robert Woodruff himself.  Robert Woodruff was the son of Edward Woodruff who bought the company from Candler all the way back in 1919. Robert had been made president of the Coca Cola Company back in 1923 at thirty three years old and had remained president until 1955 and on the board of directors until 1984.  Paul Austin, who Goizueta was replacing, was a not very well-liked CEO with a nasty temper but he increased the profits of the company ten-fold during his tenure. He had been responsible for Project Alpha which was the name of the secret project to develop Coke’s first diet drink, Tab.  Tab was a name randomly generated by Coca Cola’s huge mainframe computer. Short, artificially sweetened and a reminder to keep a tab on your calories. Austin was also in charge when possibly the most famous Coca Cola advertisement ever was released in 1971.  

ARK: The commercial was called Hilltop and was the brainchild of the McCann Erickson advertising agency, the real workplace of the fictional Don Draper.  The commercial was originally going to be filmed on the cliffs of dover with a child chorus, but the weather was angry and 65 to 70 mile an hour winds prevented filming.  The ad agency then moved to Rome and cast more than 1200 people, but rain delays and lack of footage required them to film the entire thing again after they’d already wrapped production and let everyone go.  In the end the commercial cost $250,000 to make but “I’d like to buy the world a coke” was a hit and coke received over 100 thousand letters from people saying how much they loved it.  100 thousand may not seem like much in internet terms, but for actual handwritten letters, it’s pretty impressive. Coca-Cola had always cultivated a careful press image and even back in the early days had strict rules to be followed for advertising involving their product.  One rule from the 1930’s stated: that print advertisements including oil paintings or color photographs  should show a brunette rather than a blond girl if only one girl is in the picture.  

CCK: Weird! Speaking of weird, Roberto Goizueta may have seemed like an odd choice for CEO coming from the technical side of coke production, but he was smart, pragmatic, somewhat ruthless and close to Robert Woodruff. He was also a better choice than Paul Austin’s suggestion of Ian Wilson. Putting a white South African in charge of the company during the height of international attention on freeing Nelson Mandela from prison, escalating violence in South Africa and the effort to end apartheid seemed like a bad choice. Goizueta was focused on streamlining costs and to this end, he pushed for replacement of aluminum canisters for fountain drinks which led to the development of inexpensive bag in a box containers. He also in January 1980 persuaded Robert Woodruff to let him use High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) in Coca Cola instead of cane sugar a full five years before New Coke was released. 

ARK: Which is especially ironic when you remember that Roberto Goizueta was from a family of sugar cane producers. Paul Austin who was still in charge at the time when the corn syrup proposal was made, objected.  He felt that the corn syrup led to an off taste. Also, it seemed risky to change anything about the composition of a drink based on a recipe so secret that allegedly only two people at a time within the company are allowed to know the formula and they are not permitted to travel together.  When one dies the other must choose the successor who will take over as the keeper of the 7X secret, 7X being the number of flavoring ingredients that make up the top secret taste of coke. The formula itself was moved from a vault at the Sun Trust Bank in downtown Atlanta where it had been kept since 1925 to a vault on the grounds of the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta in 2011 for the 125th anniversary of the company. But amazingly, in taste tests, no discernable difference was found between coke with sugar and coke with corn syrup alledgedly. In a completely free market economy, cane sugar would have been cheaper than high fructose corn syrup, but in the US, there were tariffs on sugar and corn syrup was subsidized by the government, so it was a cheaper alternative especially when coke was in a position to corner the market on corn syrup supplies. In other countries where HFCS is not as cheap, cane sugar is still used.  Famously, Mexican coca-cola in glass bottles with real sugar is prized among soda connoisseurs, but based on earnings information from Coca-Cola FEMSA, the Mexican bottler of Coke, even their formula is about 60 percent sugar and 40 percent high-fructose corn syrup. 

CCK: Goizueta was also the mastermind behind the launch of Project Harvard in February 1980. Though Tab was by far the best-selling diet drink in the world, Goizueta and other younger executives felt that adding Diet Coke would increase sales and allow them to leverage the Coke name in advertising. Pepsi had released Diet Pepsi in the 1960’s. Diet Coke was released in 1982 and was based not on the formula for regular coke, but rather on the formula for Tab.  The use of saccharine instead of high fructose corn syrup saved a $100 million dollars a year on production costs, though saccharine was replaced with the controversial new sweetener on the block, Aspartame in 1983. 

ARK: When Goizueta officially took over the CEO role in March 1981, he gathered the top 50 coca cola managers from around the world to make it clear that he was interested in gaining success, not just holding onto the successes they had in the past and that “there are no sacred cows” and he would consider reformulation of any product to prevent the competition from winning.

CCK: So who was the competition that was riling up Coca Cola to such an extent?  Well, that would be Pepsi. Pepsi Cola, was created just a few years after Coca Cola in 1893.  The formula for the drink was the brain child of Caleb Bradham of New Bern, North Carolina who made it at the drug store he owned.  Originally it was called, “Brad’s Drink”. It contained kola nut and was flavored with vanilla and sugar.

ARK: Luckily, Bradham came up with the more catchy Pepsi-Cola in 1898 when he advertised it as a cure for dyspepsia, otherwise known as upset stomach. Pepsi was popular, in 1903, it sold 19,000 gallons of syrup but by the 20’s and 30’s, the company went bankrupt due to speculation on sugar prices and the Pepsi brand changed hands multiple times.  During this period, Coca-Cola was offered the option of buying the Pepsi-Cola company three different times but declined.

CCK: D’OH!

ARK: Indeed. Pepsi survived the depression and in 1965 became PepsiCo when they merged the Pepsi Cola company with the Frito Lay company. Though Pepsi has never outsold Coke in total overall numbers, in the 1980’s Pepsi was outselling Coke in supermarkets, though Coke had the corner on soda machines and fast food tie ins. Also in the 1980’s, Pepsi came up with the Pepsi Challenge marketing campaign, which seemed to really get under Coca Cola’s skin and led to the creation of a secret project to change the coke formula to beat pepsi in blind taste tests.  The secret project was headed by Sergio Zyman, who had led the effort to come up with the formula for Diet Coke. Initially the New Coke project was called Zeus, then Tampa, then Eton and finally, Project Kansas.

CCK: Project Kansas was so named because of a quote from William Allen White, a legendary Kansas newspaper editor who wrote in the 1930’s: "Coca Cola is the sublimated essence of all that America stands for, a decent thing honestly made, conscientiously improved with the years.”

ARK: The goal of Project Kansas was to develop a new formula for coke that not only beat Pepsi but also original coke in blind taste tests.  The secret, was unsurprisingly, more sweetener. But what the project tried to account for and failed to anticipate was consumer sentiment.  In addition to the formula changes, Coke was conducting surveys to see how consumers reacted to the idea of new ingredients and a smoother formula.  Eleven percent of respondents had an extremely negative reaction but Coke incorrectly assumed that at least five percent of that small group would cave in and accept a better tasting drink. They should have known better, in 1982 and 1983, McCann-Erickson, introduced a hypothetical situation to consumer groups where they told people that a new version of Product X had been rolled out in a nearby city and everyone loved it.  Would you like to try it?  When the product was revealed to be Budweiser or a Hershey Bar people indicated they were willing to give it a try.  But when they revealed the product was Coca-Cola, respondents overwhelmingly objected.  Coca-Cola had so successfully marketed itself over the years that it wasn’t simply a beverage, it was a tradition. 

CCK: Nevermind that the formula had actually changed over the years, removing that pesky cocaine, changing the sweetener, altering the amounts of both caffeine and phosphoric acid. In 1984, Project Kansas finally hit on a formula that consistently won taste tests by a six point margin. Goizueta ran this information passed the 95 year old, very ill, Robert Woodruff who okayed the change and then had the good sense to die before the monster was released from the laboratory. 

ARK: How to release the new formula was the next question.  Ideally, there would just be a single formulation for the main product sold by Coca-Cola, but the flavor was too different to slip into the existing coca-cola cans, and without a major advertising boost, how would they get former Pepsi users to convert?  It was decided that just short of the hundred year anniversary, New Coke would be introduced to the world.  

CCK: How’d that go?

ARK: You remember that episode we did on the Titanic? 

CCK: Oof.

ARK: Coca-Cola thought things were going to go great.  In the early months of 1985, Coca-Cola had rolled out its products to the Soviet Union for the first time and the media had been gaga over that most American of beverages making inroads behind the Iron Curtain. Hoping to ride that swell of good sentiment, on Friday, April 19, 1985, Goizueta invited the media to a press conference set for Tuesday, April 23rd to reveal “the most significant soft-drink marketing development in the company’s nearly 100-year history.”

CCK: On the day of the big press conference, Pepsi who had been given a convenient five day lead time to find out what was going on, released advertisements in major papers saying that “the other guy just blinked” and that New Coke had been reformulated to taste more like Pepsi. The media at the press conference smelled new coke in the water and immediately went on the attack. 

ARK: Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should! 

CCK: Exactly. In surveys that had been done prior to the release of New Coke, questions about the formula changes were posed without explicitly stating that New Coke wasn’t an additional product, it was a replacement product for Coca-Cola Classic.  Once people found out that New Coke was in and Old Coke was out, they were not happy. The company received over 40 thousand letters in response to New Coke and these were not love letters.  One letter stated: “I don’t think I would be more upset if you were to burn a flag on our front yard”and another said, “Your bright marketing people will figure out that instead of converting Pepsi drinkers, you’re losing us Cokaholics to indifference if not suicide...” They also received over a thousand calls a day and the media piled on with articles that stated that instead of a smoother, rounder, bolder taste, New Coke was lumpy, square and bashful and that Coke had tampered with success. 

ARK: To give you an idea of how badly things went, Bill Cosby, one of the celebrity spokespeople for New Coke, complained that shilling for New Coke had ruined his reputation…And Fidel Castro had Radio Havana declare the death of the Real Thing as being symptomatic of the decline of America. And as for that idea that this was an effort to switch from Coca-Cola to Coke for the name, though the cans for New Coke did say Coke, not Coca-Cola, it’s unlikely that this was some master plan to switch the name permanently. Coke had been a nickname for Coca-Cola since at least 1944, when the advertising slogan, “How about a Coke?” was used.  Also, if you wanted to disentangle Coca-Cola from its cocaine soaked roots, Coke isn’t exactly the nickname I would pick. 

CCK:  People dumped New Coke into city sewers, sales for Pepsi spiked and even though in blind taste tests New Coke still won out over the classic, it was over.  On July 10, 1985, 79 days after New Coke was announced, the Coca Cola company stated that Coca-Cola Classic was returning and would once again be available alongside New Coke. And as for the idea that this was one of the most elaborate marketing ploys in history, staged to reignite brand loyalty for classic coke, Dan Keough, the chief operating officer of the Coca-Cola Company during the New Coke fiasco stated, “Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say that we planned the whole thing. The truth is we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart.”

ARK: New Coke sales plummeted even further once Classic Coke was available, in spite of having Max Headroom, a computer generated talking head for a spokesperson. "C-c-catch the wave!"

CCK: Artificial Intelligence for Artificial Coke.

ARK: It took a while for Coca Cola sales to rebound back to 1984 levels, but eventually overall sales for Coca Cola Classic exceeded Pepsi once again.   

CCK: Ultimately, New Coke has disappointed us once again, first from a marketing standpoint, and now from a conspiracy standpoint, but with a company as huge and as old as coca cola, there are still plenty of other conspiracies to be had, unfortunately, none of them are as fun and harmless as New Coke. 

ARK: The Coca Cola company has been sued for union busting in South America and Turkey, including accusations that Coca Cola Bottling companies in Columbia hired paramilitary groups to murder union workers. Coca Cola stated at the time that per their original bottling agreement back in the 1800’s, bottlers were not part of their company, but in Columbia, the Coca Cola company owned a 28% share of the bottling plants in question. 

CCK: Coke has also been accused of allowing child labor, unsafe working conditions and unfair wages at other bottling plants around the world, and of land and water right purchases that have destroyed local farms, stolen water from indigenous people and paid corrupt governments for the right to dump toxic waste into rivers and streams in other countries.

ARK: And then there’s the main components of Coca-Cola caffeine, salt and sweetener. Caffeine is a stimulant and a diuretic which makes you urinate.  The sodium in the soda makes you thirsty and the sweetener hides the taste of the salt.  Thus creating a loop of thirst where you drink Coke and then want to drink more. 

CCK: <Can opening Noise> What?

ARK: Did you not hear anything we just said?  

CCK: But that’s Coca-Cola, this is Diet Coke, Just for the Taste of it! Open Happiness!  Stay Extraordinary!