Jilted Coke Heir Wants To Sell Copy Of Soft Drink Recipe
Over the years, many people have claimed to have the original recipe for Coca-Cola, only to be met with skepticism.
Now, the great-grandson of the company’s co-founder says he needs cash and wants to sell the real thing.
Unfortunately for Frank M. Robinson, the document is in the hands of his estranged wife.
“I’m not in good financial shape. I’d sell it, if the price was right,” Robinson said earlier this month. “If it’s got value, what use is it to me to hold onto it?” Patti Robinson, who contends her husband gave her one of the most closely held corporate secrets as a pre-marriage “trinket” in 1981, refuses to part with it. She rejected an offer by Robinson to split the proceeds with her.
“I want my son to have it,” she said.
The Coca-Cola Co., meanwhile, said Friday it doubts the authenticity of the Robinson recipe.
Robinson insists his Coke is it.
Robinson’s great-grandfather was Frank Robinson, who has a crucial place in Coke’s early history. A business associate of John S. Pemberton, the 19th century Atlanta pharmacist who invented the drink, the elder Robinson named the product Coca-Cola and designed the script logo that still is used today.
The younger Robinson says the recipe was among a batch of his great-grandfather’s old Coca-Cola papers that he received from his father shortly before his death in 1970.
Robinson, 57, denied he gave his wife the recipe, describing it as “marital property” that somehow ended up in her safe deposit box instead of his.
Robinson’s family amassed a fortune, much of it in Coca-Cola stock. But he was cut out of an inheritance during a family feud in the 1980s, and now, stricken with cancer, gets by on about $21,000 a year as a real estate broker 40 miles south of Atlanta.
To him, the formula means much-needed cash. He is unconcerned about possibly shattering the enduring wall of secrecy at Coke.
“It’s their secret,” he said. “I’m not a troublemaker, but I have preserved it.”
The recipe is but a side item in a dispute over support payments that recently brought Robinson and his wife to Fulton County Superior Court, where lawyers for each met privately in a continuing effort to reach a settlement.
The value of the recipe, handwritten on four or five small pieces of tablet paper, is mainly historical.
One might manage to use the formula - which Robinson said includes such ingredients as “gingerene,” coca leaves and a mix of oils known as “7X” - to duplicate a Coke. But it is doubtful that anyone, even armed with the formula, could hope to challenge the $18 billion company’s worldwide marketing and distribution system.
Anyway, Atlanta-based Coca-Cola has periodically made minor changes in the formula over the years.
Mrs. Robinson said she had a brewer this year use the recipe to mix up a batch of ersatz Coke. The result, she said, tasted good but not like Coca-Cola.
Rob Baskin, a spokesman for Coca-Cola, said the Robinson recipe is merely the latest in a long line of claims that have never been authenticated. Coke says the only copy of the original recipe is locked in a bank vault.
The company has not seen Robinson’s recipe.
“We’ve never seen evidence that Mr. Pemberton shared the formula with anybody - even Mr. Robinson, who was without question a close business associate,” Baskin said.