coca cola

Pemberton called for five ounces of coca leaf per gallon of syrup, a significant dose, whereas, in 1891, Candler claimed his formula (altered extensively from Pemberton’s original) contained only a tenth of this amount. Coca Cola did once contain an estimated nine milligrams of cocaine per glass, but in 1903 it was removed. Coca Cola still contains coca flavouring.
After 1904, Coca Cola started using, instead of fresh leaves, “spent” leaves - the leftovers of the cocaine-extraction process with cocaine trace levels left over at a molecular level. To this day, Coca Cola uses as an ingredient a cocaine free coca leaf extract prepared at a Stepan Company plant in Maywood, New Jersey.
In the United States, Stepan Company is the only manufacturing plant authorized by the Federal Government to import and process the coca plant. Stepan laboratory in Maywood, New Jersey, is the nation’s only legal commercial importer of coca leaves, which it obtains mainly from Peru and, to a lesser extent, Bolivia. Besides producing the coca flavouring agent for Coca Cola, Stepan Company extracts cocaine from the coca leaves, which it sells to Mallinckrodt, a St. Louis, Missouri pharmaceutical manufacturer that is the only company in the United States licensed to purify cocaine for medicinal use. N.J. Stepan buys about 100 metric tons of dried Peruvian coca leaves each year, said Marco Castillo, spokesman for Peru’s state-owned National Coca Co.