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. 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.