March 12 marks the 119th anniversary of Coke being sold in bottles for the first time. And in honor of the milestone, we thought we’d let you in on 10 of the beverage company’s lesser-known secrets. So here goes nothing:
1. Coke’s $48 billion in revenue in 2012 would rank it somewhere in the high seventies on the list of the world’s largest economies, near Slovenia and Costa Rica.
2. Pretty much everyone in the world knows what Coke is. About 94 percent of the world’s population recognizes the company’s logo, according to Business Insider. It’s also the second-most well understood word in the English language after “okay.”
3. John Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola, originally concocted the beverage while trying to come up with a cure for his Civil War-induced morphine addiction.
4. Humans consume nearly 10,450 Coca-Cola products every second of every day.
5. As a result, Americans take in about 10.8 pounds of sugar per person per year on average just from Coke products, according to Business Insider.
6. Each Coca-Cola product is tested 450 times before it goes to market.
7. Men who drink more than one quart of Coke per day could be harming their sperm, according to a 2010 Danish study.
8. Coke has the ability to dissolve certain masses of indigestible foods that get stuck in our stomachs, a January study from the University of Athens found.
And now you know.
