The backlash was more widespread and vehement than anyone could have anticipated.
They began shipping the new formula that week, and most of the bottling plants around the United States, along with almost all the international plants, were using it a fortnight later when their existing syrup stocks ran out.
The response from the public was both immediate and frightening. There were public rallies in Pittsburgh, marches in Washington DC, and near riots in some areas of Los Angeles.
Coca-Cola denied the recipe had changed, although it was pretty obvious to anyone with tastebuds that it had.
Network news bulletins carried the news as a lead story, and even the normally sedate New York Times had a front page banner asking, ‘Is this the Real Thing?’
Local channels interrupted daytime programming, including the popular soap, The Beautiful Years, to report the story, but that only caused a backlash against the channels from viewers for whom nothing less than World War Three would have justified interrupting the programme.
People began stockpiling older bottles, with the original formula, and a black market took off on the Internet with cans of ‘Old Coke’ selling for up to twenty times the price of the new product. Two US Congressmen came out swinging at The Coca-Cola Company, and a group of lawyers in Seattle filed a class-action suit to force Coca-Cola to change back.
What they didn’t realise, of course, was just how impossible that was.
Critics called the drink, ‘the Coke you have when you’re not having a Coke’. David Letterman, on The Late Show, called it ‘Joke-a-Cola’, while Jay Leno on The Tonight Show, paraphrasing an old Coca-Cola advertising line, said, ‘Things go better with … just about anything else,’ before pouring a can of Coke down a toilet that had been set up on stage.
This caused a renewed outbreak of fury, directed, not at Jay Leno, who had done the pouring, but at The Coca-Cola Company, who had done the mixing.
There was something sacred, it seemed, about the century-old soft drink, something deeply embedded in the American psyche. Pouring Coke down a toilet was akin to burning an American flag, and the anger was real and extreme, as if the executives at The Coca-Cola Company were, somehow, trying to cheat the American public out of their heritage.
Nor was the raging storm limited to the United States. In Mexico and Iceland, the two largest per-capita drinkers of Coca-Cola in the world, cars were overturned and buses burned in some of the largest street riots seen in those countries. Particularly in Iceland, where rioting was a relatively unknown pastime. In Uruguay a seventy-year-old man chained himself to the top of a church steeple, claiming that he would not come down until they re-introduced the original recipe. In Rio de Janeiro a special Coca-Cola Carnival was held, in a strange kind of prayer to Coca-Cola to reconsider.
Coca-Cola stocks dropped. They plummeted in fact, faster than they had during the New Coke blunder of the 1980s, and there was no sign of the near miraculous recovery that had occurred back then, when they had simply reverted to the original flavour.
Most of this, Fizzer and Tupai learned from the newspapers that were delivered daily to their expensive suite at the Four Seasons hotel. Some of it they picked up from the television news, and other information came to them first hand in the shape of Anastasia Borkin, who visited them daily, partly to check on them and partly to check on the armed guards, who were rostered in shifts in the corridor outside their room. No point in taking chances, she thought.
The next day brought even more bad news for The Coca-Cola Company, when a major fast food restaurant chain announced it was breaking a long tradition of serving only Coca-Cola products, and would, in future, be supplying a cheaper Australian soft drink. This announcement followed hard on the heels of similar announcements from some major international airlines.
The day also brought more news from the FBI, which was handling the kidnapping charges that had been levelled against Robert, Leonard, Kenneth, Hank and Curtis Cooper, five brothers who ran a mixed ranch and racing stables in Macon, Georgia.
The Cooper brothers, it turned out, were well-known to the local law enforcement agency, and State Troopers had been on their way to investigate the farm when two idiots, yelling and screaming from the top of a large green tractor, had waylaid them.
The FBI had asked the boys to stay around until they could properly arraign the Cooper brothers, and The Coca-Cola Company was happy to foot the hotel bills, considering what they had put the lads through.
The Cooper brothers were not entirely co-operative, but a mixture of promises and threats in separate interviews had the FBI convinced that they were no more than hired muscle, paid to keep the two boys under lock and key.
All other things considered, the whole affair had been an unmitigated disaster. The taste tests were discontinued, as the only thing The Coca-Cola Company could be sure of, was that if changing the formula once had been a disaster, then changing it a second time would be a catastrophe, unless they could absolutely guarantee they had re-discovered the original recipe.
All efforts were directed into the search for the Coca-Cola Three, but this too had turned into a series of blind alleys and red herrings, and the investigation was treading water with no good leads.
The Coca-Cola Company, of course, paid Fizzer and Tupai the agreed hourly rate, but not the huge bonus they would have got for cracking the formula.
It was probably enough to cover Fizzer’s university expenses, but it wouldn’t get him and his dad out of the caravan, and Italian sports cars were definitely out of the question.
Within the boardroom of The Coca-Cola Company a furious debate was raging, which saw some of the most vitriolic speeches the walnut-lined walls had witnessed. Some of those present, including Anastasia Borkin, wanted to come clean with the American public and let them know of the kidnappings and the reason for the change in the formula.
‘They’ll sympathise,’ she expounded, whenever she had the chance. ‘They’ll take pity on us and forgive us the new taste while we keep searching.’
Others wanted to continue to deny any change had occurred, as if it were just some collective fantasy.
‘There are millions of Coke drinkers out there who are continuing to drink the new flavour,’ was Ricardo’s argument. ‘We’ve already alienated the Coke fans. If we admit there really was a change, then all we’ll do is alienate everyone else. Deny, deny, deny. We’ll suffer, but we’ll survive. Wash our dirty linen in public and we won’t last out the year.’
Borkin thought Ricardo was more concerned about lasting out the year as Vice-President (Production) than he was about Coca-Cola, the Company, lasting out the year.
Eventually, of course, the arraignment took place, and, after signing affidavits, both Tupai and Fizzer were allowed to return home. First class, which was part of The Coca-Cola Company’s way of saying sorry.
Borkin herself drove them to the airport, in her own private car. Somehow the brightly coloured company limousines seemed inappropriate for what was not a brightly coloured occasion.
The farewell was long and quite emotional, but she eventually watched them walk away through security to their waiting flight with an overwhelming feeling of guilt. Guilt born of seeing them arrive, excited and happy with their heads held high, and now to be sending them off home again. Defeated. Dejected. Disillusioned.