Coca-Cola, a company first famous for mixing South American coca leaves with African kola nuts, is trying to repeat history.

For months, the Atlanta-based drinks giant has been working quietly to perfect prototype beverages using Chinese herbal cures. Analysts and executives suggest the project could be as important to the company’s future as its original formula was to its past.

The effort involves employees throughout the company of 90,500 but is shrouded in secrecy. Executives have rarely mentioned the collaboration beyond a short press release issued when Coke and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences opened a research center in Beijing last October.

Until this month, journalists had not visited the laboratory, called the Coca-Cola Research Center for Chinese Medicine.

Zhang Huaying, Coke’s director of the center, said the company was developing specific beverages but declined to provide details about what is in them, when they might be released or how much the company is spending on the effort.

Access Asia, a Shanghai-based market-research firm, said in a January report that Coke’s aim may be nothing less than to create “the new product for the new millennium.”

Just-drinks.com, which monitors the beverage industry, reported in May that Coke was planning to launch a Chinese medicine-based drink this year “to exploit the hype surrounding the Beijing Olympics.”

At the Beijing research center, 40 people work in a laboratory partly financed by Coke. In one room, a machine extracted liquids from plants and mixed them into beverages. In another, a researcher used cell cultures to test traditional cures thought to slow aging.

Cao Hongxin, the president of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, said that the center “has a few projects” with Coca-Cola.

“Generally speaking, we want to create drinks that relieve fatigue and help the body fight off diseases,” he said. “[Coke executives] all hope to develop a Chinese-medicine-based beverage quickly.”

—Craig Simons, The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, 07/29/08