Coca-Cola may be one of the most recognized brands on the planet, but do you really need to know or even care what the exact recipe is? A man in Georgia is claiming that he has the recipe, and took to eBay to sell it off for the auction price of $5 million and a buy it now price of $15 million. Would you spend that much to obtain a recipe?

The seller claims that he and his wife found the recipe in a box from an estate sale four years ago. In the auction he tells of the history of how Coca-Cola was invented, the uses for it at the time, and gives details about the two-sided paper that contains the recipe. The photo is referred to as a “Swiss cheese” version of the recipe, so as to not reveal the ingredients to everyone else, and he states that whoever typed it up at the very least had seen the original recipe.

The auction stated:

May we make this perfectly clear - we can never guarantee and never claim that this is the actual recipe for Coca Cola. Even if this formula was 100% accurate in every aspect-- as mentioned above-- there are only two people in the world that can verify it's accuracy, and I doubt they will be willing to compromise Coca Cola to acknowledge our exactness. That is why we are selling this as a historic artifact.

Naturally there are debates as to whether or not the recipe is authentic, with the chief archivist for Coca-Cola saying:

At least once a year, somebody shows up and says, 'I have the original formula for Coca-Cola. How much do you want to pay me for it?'... We know he doesn't have the formula. There is only one copy. He has what one of the many imitator copies floating around out there. So I'm going to go to sleep peacefully knowing that we still have our copy of the formula.

Whether the recipe is the real deal or not, someone decided it was legitimate enough to take the buy it now option and spent $15 million to get their hands on it. Will they start a business with the recipe and try to put Coke out of business? I’m betting that won’t be happening anytime soon.

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