The recipe is supposedly kept in a locked vault, and Coke at one point had an advertising campaign about the two top executives who knew the secret and couldn't fly on the same plane or the formula could be lost forever.
"We think we may have found the original recipe for Coca Cola," said the host of "This American Life" Ira Glass in opening the hour-long program that aired over the weekend.
"One of the most famously guarded trade secrets on the planet -- I have it right here and I am going to read it to you and read it to the world and make my case for why it is real, despite what Coca Cola may say."
The handwritten formula was discovered in a pharmacist's old book of recipes and published in the company's hometown paper -- the Atlanta Journal Constitution -- in 1979, Glass said.
"If that seems a strange and random place to find this kind of thing, well, Coke was invented by a pharmacist and was originally sold at pharmacy soda fountains," he said.
The book apparently originally belonged to an acquaintance of Coke's inventor, John Pemberton, and was then passed from one pharmacist to another before it was eventually discovered by the newspaper columnist.
The newspaper even published a picture of the recipe, which was clear enough to read each ingredient.
What convinced Glass is that the formula matched -- and filled out -- a partial recipe found in Coke's archives that also became public.
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