alt Hacker NewsI'd be very interested to know how they produce it if the formula is so tightly held. At some point people need to be purchasing the ingredients and mixing them together.
Replies
Slightly unrelated, the recent LabCoatz video went into a bit about the CocaCola recipe and how it's protected: https://youtu.be/TDkH3EbWTYc?si=GuvCd-kKXP5_gcRs&t=26
He mentions that the ingredients are shipped unlabeled from different facilities who don't know what they're making.
He then goes on to reverse engineer the formula. Because science.
You could say the same about cryptographic signatures where each party only knows a part of the key, yet those all work fine. You could probably piece together the formula by a sum of some employees and some external suppliers if everyone broke their NDA, but if people keep their word, your factories could just as well see shipments of "Ingredient A" and the worker only knows how much to add to each batch.
Exactly what I was thinking. I mean how can you produce something, esp. in bulk, when the exact ingredients and quantities aren't known? Assuming it is made in a typical factory, the machines would have to be programmed and that would typically mean someone has to know. I wonder if they split the knowledge over several different groups so a group only knows a single piece? Hmm....
Considering how complex some software can get, it's more surprising there are people who can hold enough of the whole design in their heads that they have a good idea of what's going on in general.
A fairly obvious solution (IMO) would be to have multiple people buying the ingredients, some even buying unused ingredients. That would cover purchasing.
The mixing, again, spreading it out, have factory A mix ingredients x, y, and z, factory B mix ingredients Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and factory C mix factory A and B's mixtures.
It's possible to separate out these tasks such that no single person or group has every needed piece of the puzzle.
The Carthusian monks who produce Chartreuse (a collection of herbal liqueurs popular for use in cocktails) have been producing it and protecting the secret 130 ingredient recipe for over 400 years successfully. At any given time no more than three of the monks hold the entire recipe, and yet they have a company they have formed to execute most of the production without the secret being leaked.
The designated monks coordinate production and are involved in QC, as well as developing new blends for special releases, but much production is done by paid employees who do not know the complete recipe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur)