Mark Pendergrast

Charles' dad, um, Asa, was so paranoid about anybody else getting hold of the secret formula for 7X that even though he was president of Coca-Cola, he's president of the company, he would go through the company mail himself and remove the invoices for any ingredients that had been purchased so that nobody in the accounting department could read what ingredients had been bought for the product.

I learned all this, uh, from A History of Coca-Cola, a book written by investigative journalist and historian Mark Pendergrast.

The company has always said, and as far as I know it's true, that only two people at any given time know how to actually mix the 7X flavoring ingredient, and that these people never travel on the same airplane in case it crashes.

Uh, it's this carefully passed-on, you know, secret ritual, and that the formula is kept in a bank vault at SunTrust, which used to be the, uh, Georgia Trust Company.

Yeah.

Uh, so I'm looking at it here.

We sent a copy of that photo where you can see the recipe for Coca-Cola to that historian of Coca-Cola, the guy who wrote that book, Mark Pendergrast.

And my question for you is, could this be real?