Coca-Cola Still Imports Coca Leaves

On a 65-acre site in Maywood, New Jersey, the Stepan Company runs the only legal coca-leaf importation in the United States. The DEA grants it a unique license. Trucks arrive with bales of leaves from Peru and Bolivia — somewhere between 56 and 588 metric tons a year, depending on the year — and Stepan extracts the cocaine alkaloid out of them.

The cocaine goes one way: to Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, which sells it as a topical anesthetic mostly used in ear, nose, and throat surgery. The leaves go the other way. Once decocainized, they are processed into a flavor extract and shipped to Coca-Cola in Atlanta, where they remain part of the formula. The famous 7X — the secret blend that the company has guarded since 1886 — is the other flavor components; the coca extract is its own ingredient.

The arrangement dates to a 1903 reformulation. Coca-Cola had been launched in 1885 by John Pemberton as a syrup containing both coca leaf and kola nut, and the original drink contained a small but real dose of cocaine. Public anxiety, then federal pressure, forced the active alkaloid out. Pemberton's successors did not want to lose the leaf flavor itself, so they negotiated a process: keep the botanical, lose the drug. By 1929 the supplier had become the Maywood Chemical Works, which Stepan bought in 1959.

Nothing about this is hidden. Stepan's annual reports describe it; the DEA publishes the import quotas. The strange part is just that it never stopped.