My Trip to Coca-Cola

Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit the Coca-Cola Company offices and labs here in Atlanta. I went there to visit Dr. Lihong D'Angelo, an Emory graduate, who worked as a manager of functional ingredients for several years until recently when she took a position that is more involved in marketing. The labs I visited were mainly working on the three big products: Coke, Fanta, and Sprite. In the Research and Development labs I watched a researcher use an emulsifier to homogenize an oily ingredient into a fruit punch drink. After emulsification there was a machine that could measure the droplet size. That was really cool. It was also interesting because everything in that particular lab was entirely edible. It would be ok to lick your fingers while you were working! That's hard to imagine. It also smelled really good--like a nice fresh batch of fruit punch. The purpose of the work they were doing was to study possible new ingredients and determine techniques to include them in beverage products.
Another lab I visited mainly tested the durability of the products: whether a ring would form if left on the shelf and how fluctuating temperatures would affect the beverage. I also saw a piece of equipment that was an aging machine. It wasn't exactly clear how it worked, but it some how simulates aging of the product for testing purposes.
Next I saw the microbiology labs. Here the researchers attempt to plate bacteria in the presence of different ingredients to determine what compounds will be best for a product with a long shelf life. There was a small scale bottling machine that was also used for research to simulate the actual product. I also saw a lot of gas chromatography and liquid chromatography equipment for product development use. Next I saw the sensory labs where taste testing occurs. There is a special room with adjustable lighting so that the color of the product won't influence the participants perception of taste. I saw how the taste of any product could be mapped onto a matrix. So if researchers want to develop a product with a specific taste they map an image and then conduct testing until they are able to match the desired map. Also, I was curious who gets to do the taste testing. It turns out that it is the employees who do all of the taste testing. Before you can perform certain tests the researchers determine your tasting ability. Some people are classified as super tasters and these people get to participate in the most experiments, while others are below average tasters and they only participate in studies of products late in development.
Overall it was a very interesting trip. I didn't get to visit the Quality Assurance labs which probably contained even more analytical chemistry (like Dr. Norton has told us about her experience working at Coca-Cola). The thing that I thought was most interesting about the labs was that the researchers come from several different disciplines: Chemistry, Microbiology, Engineering, Nutrition, and Psychology for example.