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. "