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by office_drone 742 days ago
If you, like me, are wondering "has anyone just run it through a mass spectrometer to see what the ingredients are?" the answer is yes, they have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbDP0TF_70

4 comments

I'll follow up with John Green's blind tasting. Which is just one of my favourite videos related to Dr Pepper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcOM3H06KI4

Like I never gave the drink a second thought before this video. Now I can't get it out of my mind.

I don't even drink soda.

104 year old: "2 doctors have told me that if I drink it I'll die, but they died first"
The thing about trying to work out food ingredients via analytical chemistry is that it largely boils down to "lots of compounds in ppm, ppb, and ppt quantities" which if you're missing one of them causes the taste to go off. So it will tell you lots of things, but it won't really do anything to clarify what "natural flavors" are in the ingredient list.
IMO, the most distinct flavors in Dr. Pepper are cherry and almond. Benzaldehyde, an "artificial cherry" molecule listed in this spectrometer video, is found in both cherry and almond extracts.

If you're familiar with the taste of amaretto or marzipan, try thinking of those next time you drink a Dr. Pepper. That will unlock the flavor discrimination for you.

Amaretto is a key ingredient of a Flaming Dr Pepper, which does indeed taste surprisingly close to Dr Pepper.
You can potentially take a list of the finite natural flavors that are commercially sold in quantities to produce Dr pepper world wide and perform some sort of likelihood analysis based on these concentrations in the sample.
The secret ingredient is benzoic acid.
Yeah, cherry vanilla soda is definitely always what I thought it tasted like.
When I was a kid, I had to take this medicine that came in a very cherry-flavored syrup. I hated it. To make it tolerable for me, my parents mixed it into a shot glass of Pepsi.

When I grew up, I tried Dr. Pepper, and immediately recognized the taste.