Caffeine For Sale: The Hidden Trade Of The World’s Favorite Stimulant : The Salt : NPR.

“We fill these cardboard totes with 1,200 pounds of caffeine, and they get shipped to customers,” he says. It goes first to refiners who remove all the impurities, and then it goes to beverage companies — like Coca Cola or Pepsi — that mix caffeine into their products.

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Germany, where caffeine was first removed from coffee beans, has several decaffeination plants, including the world’s largest. In fact, more than half of the decaf coffee sold in America first makes the long voyage from the tropics to Germany to get its caffeine removed before heading to the U.S.

If you’re a beverage maker looking for caffeine, though, there’s also another source: big factories in China.

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One of the most popular and most used “brain hacks” caffeine, how it’s made, where and who it goes to.