How a Victorian-era medicine spawned one of the nation's richest companies and became the world's most recognizable brand Secret Formula follows the colorful characters who turned a relic from the patent medicine era into a company worth $80 billion. Award-winning reporter Frederick Allen's engaging account begins with Asa Candler, a nineteenth-century pharmacist in Atlanta who secured the rights to the original Coca-Cola formula and then struggled to get the cocaine out of the recipe. After many tweaks, he finally succeeded in turning a backroom belly-wash into a thriving enterprise. In 1919, an aggressive banker named Ernest Woodruff leveraged a high-risk buyout of the Candlers and installed his son at the helm of the company. Robert Woodruff spent the next six decades guiding Coca-Cola with a single-minded determination that turned the soft drink into a part of the landscape and social fabric of America. Written with unprecedented access to Coca-Cola's archives, as well as the inner circle and private papers of Woodruff, Allen's captivating business biography stands as the definitive account of what it took to build America's most iconic company and one of the world's greatest business success stories. "A clear, convincing, anecdotal, often fascinating portrayal not just of Coca-Cola's corporate brilliance, but of how it inveighed its way into the center of American, and world, consciousness." -Financial Times " A] highly entertaining history . . . A juicy look at wheeling-dealing, litigation, global hustling, cola wars and the marketing savvy that carved a niche for Coke in the American social psyche." -Publishers Weekly "At times the book reads like a Russian novel combined with a thriller. It will appeal to the general reader as well as to students of history." -Library Journal "Allen seems to have had unprecedented access to company insiders, corporate archives, and private papers, and he uncovers a trove of information about corporate political clout at home and abroad. . . . Allen successfully contributes to the fascinating lore surrounding this symbol of American culture and enterprise." -Booklist Frederick Allen was an award-winning reporter and political columnist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1972 to 1987, after which he joined CNN as a chief analyst and commentator covering the 1988 presidential election. His essays for the program Inside Politics earned CNN a CableACE Award, and Allen was called the "best political analyst"