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Welcome to another episode of Behind the Science,

Rockstar edition.

I'm your host, Jennifer Fournier.

Today as I'm here eating my lunch

and enjoying my favorite carbonated soft drink,

it occurs to me that in, all my recent travels

around the world, this soft drink

has always tasted the same.

In this episode of Behind the Science,

let's dive into the topic of consistency and control

of quality in beverages.

To shed light on this, I'm going to turn to our very own food

rockstar, Joe Romano.

Hi, Joe.

How are you doing today?

Great.

Hi, Jen.

Great to see you.

Good to see you too, so I know that you've done a lot of work

on beverage analysis.

And I love my carbonated soft drinks

and it always amazes me, as I travel

around the world, the consistency of the taste

no matter where I am.

Yes, beverage manufacturers go to great lengths

to ensure the quality and consistency

of the key ingredients in any geography.

In fact, the quality control labs

at these production facilities

make sure that the additives

such as preservatives,

sweeteners,

and caffeine are at the level

that they should be

and therefore provide consistency and give you

the taste that you expect.

Let me show you on the white board how the process works.

That'd be great.

OK.

First, incoming processed water

is treated and filtered to produce high purity water.

Syrup concentrate is then added along with a sweetener

to produce a pre-mix.

Next, CO2 is added to create a carbonated beverage.

A controlled beverage sample is taken from the pre-mix for

UPLC analysis of caffeine, sweeteners, and preservatives.

If the ingredients meet the target range,

the batch is sent on to the filling station

to be packaged into bottles or cans.

Joe, that was so interesting.

So what happens if they get an unexpected result?

Well, by minimizing the cost of an out of spec batch,

a production facility can save approximately $24,000.

Wow, that's a lot of money.

So it's definitely worth doing QC testing on it.

It sure is.

So my other question is that in this hand, I have diet,

and in this hand, I have regular.

It looks exactly the same.

How can you tell the difference?

Well, let me take some samples and we

can run it on our system.

And I can show you how we tell the difference.

Sounds good.

OK, let's do it.

And Jen, here are the results.

First, we see a standard chromatogram

which shows the preservatives,

sweeteners, and caffeine

from the analysis.

In the second chromatogram,

we see the diet cola,

where we see the non-nutritive sweeteners,

a preservative,

as well as caffeine,

which identifies the key ingredients

in the diet cola.

Now for a regular cola,

what we would see

is the same profile,

except the non-nutritive sweetener

would be absent from the chromatogram.

I have a new appreciation for the quality control

that goes into carbonated beverages.

Waters' kit combined with the LC system

provides a robust rockstar instrument

that the QC lab can rely on.

Now every time I enjoy my favorite beverage,

I know exactly what makes it taste so great all the time.

Check out the links below to learn more

about controlling consistency

using the beverage analysis kit.

And join us next time for another episode

of Behind the Science, Rockstar edition.