Guide to Atlanta’s World of Coca-Cola - Know Before You Go!
- Dara
- 10 hours ago
- 10 min read
Welcome to Atlanta Georgia, home to one of the world’s most iconic brands: Coca-Cola. I finally fulfilled a long time bucket list activity in visiting the World of Coca-Cola, a unique interactive museum that showcases the brand’s storied 135 year history through a variety of fun multimedia exhibits and experiences. Visitors also get a chance to meet a very famous polar bear, get up close to the vault holding the company’s most guarded secret, and sample unique Coca-Cola products from around the world. This isn’t your average old-fashioned museum! I’ll give you an overview of what to expect on your visit, what each gallery offers, and provide my overall thoughts - is this a unique Atlanta experience, or are you just paying Coke to be advertised to?
Atlanta's World of Coca-Cola | Table of Contents
Location
The World of Coca-Cola is located in the heart of downtown Atlanta, across from Centennial Olympic Park. The museum entrance faces Pemberton Place, a five acre green space great for lounging and relaxing before or after your visit. Directly across Pemberton Place is the Georgia Aquarium, another famous must-see Atlanta attraction! I’ve also got a blog post and a video on visiting the Georgia Aquarium, so don’t forget to check those out as well.
Parking & Public Transportation
The parking garage address for the World of Coca-Cola is 126 Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd NW, Atlanta Georgia, 30313. Parking fees start at $20 per vehicle as of December 2025, but do check the museum’s website for the most up to date pricing.
The World of Coca-Cola can also be reached by public transit using Atlanta’s MARTA system. The current fare is $2.50 as of December 2025. By train, the Georgia Aquarium can be reached from the Dome/GWCC/Philips Arena/CNN Center Station on the Blue/Green line or from the Civic Center or Peachtree Center Stations on the Red/Gold line. Each of these stations is about a 10 - 15 minute walk to the aquarium.
Tickets
The museum opens at 10 am daily, with closing times varying by day (typically in the 5 pm - 9 pm range), so do check ahead online.
There are two main options for tickets. The general admission ticket provides access to all the exhibits and interactive experiences as a self-guided tour. You do have to select a ticket date when purchasing ahead, but you can arrive at any point during opening hours. As of December 2025, the adult general admission (ages 13 - 64) price range is $23 - $27, spending on the date you select. The website has a calendar showing the prices for each day of the month, so if you have flexibility you can select one of the lower cost dates.
For my visit, I chose the second option - the guided tour ticket. The guided tour is 1 hour long, and in addition to the guide you receive a beverage at the start, get to use some hidden short cuts to maximize efficiency in moving from gallery to gallery, and are granted some skip-the-line opportunities. That can be really useful if you visit on a crowded day. The price range for the guided tours is $45 - $50, and do note that for this option you have to select both the date and time. If you want to do this option, book ahead, as these can sell out.
When to Go & How Long to Spend
The best days to go for both lower pricing and smaller crowds are to avoid holidays, school breaks, and weekends. I couldn’t avoid the busy times on my visit, so I went as soon as the museum opened at 10 am on a summer Sunday. With the efficiency of the guided tour, I got a great initial look around before the crowds arrived. The museum’s website says that most visitors spend between 90 minutes and 2 hours here, but if you’re really a fan of the brand, plan to spend about 3 - 3 1/2 hours. I did the guided tour and then went back around the museum to see a bit more of what the tour didn’t touch on. By my second go-round, I was fighting the crowds. The gallery walking spaces aren’t the widest for the amount of people the museum accommodates.
Food
There is no outside food or beverage permitted, but you will have the opportunity to taste Coca-Cola products as you go through the museum. There is no food for purchase inside, but the Bottle Cap Cafe is located just outside the museum, in case you need a pre or post visit snack.
The World of Coca-Cola Museum
The Map
The museum covers two levels, and each gallery is centered around the central hub, so it’s an easy museum to navigate. There’s no one “correct” way to explore, but if you’re visiting on a busy day, you may want to tackle the more popular exhibits first - The Tasting Room and Vault of the Secret Formula are two of the more popular ones. You don’t want to be in those during peak hours on a busy day.
The Lobby
After passing through security, you’ll arrive in the main lobby. If you booked the guided tour then this is where you’ll meet your guide, or else you’ll wait here for the main doors to open to let you into the experience. The Coca-Cola exhibits do start in this space though, as the waiting area features large scale artistic soda bottles from around the world.
Coca-Cola Loft
This next space is home to a mix of nearly 200 historical artifacts that represent Coca-Cola’s long storied tradition. In the Coca-Cola Loft you'll find items covering over a century’s worth of history, spanning nearly 3 dozen countries. It’s really interesting to see how a brand grew and developed over 135 years, from the physical goods to the advertising styles.
Coca-Cola Theater
You’ll next enter the Coca-Cola Theater and watch a 6 minute video on life’s “Moments of Happiness.” This is really just pure Coca-Cola propaganda, showing you a large screened montage of people experiencing life’s memorable moments with a Coca-Cola beverage in hand. That said, it’s actually pretty well done and surprisingly emotional - I definitely teared up a bit, which was not on my bingo card for spending a day at a soda museum.
After the film plays, the theater opens up into the main atrium, a 2 story lobby that leads to all the different gallery areas.
Vault of the Secret Formula
This is actually where the original written recipe and top secret formula for Coca-Cola is kept safe and secured.
The Vault of the Secret Formula is an interactive multimedia journey that allows you to discover the history of Coca-Cola’s secret recipe, from its origins in 1886 to its current home since 2011, the vault at the end of the gallery.
As I mentioned above, this is one of the more popular areas of the museum, and the guided tour allows you to pass the queue to enter. Our guide led us through the first part of the exhibit, which is a series of fun interactive displays that highlight the plight of the formula over the years and the efforts to keep it out of competitors hands.
The highlight is, of course, the vault itself, located at the end of the gallery in the chamber of the secret formula. Yes, it is a real vault, the real original handwritten paper from the 1800s is in there, and yes the vault will issue a LOUD warning if you get too close, which I accidentally did when I touched the railing while posing for this photo, Whoops!
The Studios
The Studios is a new gallery, one that opened after my visit. Though much of the content is similar, it’s much more interactive than the older gallery that I saw - the World of Coca-Cola is definitely moving in a more high tech direction, trending away from the more traditional museum style. This gallery’s theme is exploring Coca-Cola’s influence on music, fashion, sports, art, and entertainment. You’ll learn how Coca-Cola became a part of pop culture and see over 150 rare Coca-Cola objects. You can customize your own virtual Coke bottle and create your own Coca-Cola inspired music track. The Olympic memorabilia is also housed here, and with the guided tour, we were able to hold and take photos with a real Olympic torch from the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics.
Beverage Lab
In this fun space you get to explore the science behind the soda. You can mix and match flavors to create your own one of a kind flavor profile.
The Beverage Lab is also where we got to try an infamous blast from the past, released from the Coca-Cola vault for this exhibit - one of the biggest product failures of the 20th century - April 1985’s New Coke.
It lasted a whole 79 days before the original recipe was resuscitated, rebranding itself as Coca-Cola Classic. New Coke did stick around as well for a while, but was eventually discontinued. Not sure if I ever had New Coke as a kid, but this was definitely my first time trying it as an adult. It was pretty terrible.
Coca-Cola Stories
Formerly the 3D theater space, this is also a newer gallery, using technology and AI to bring Coca-Cola to life in ways not done before. The Coca-Cola Stories gallery features hundreds of artifacts, along with AI assisted photo opportunities where you can see yourself in a vintage Coca-Cola advertisement or posing with a 1930s Coke delivery van. You can also visit an early 20th century soda fountain with a virtual clerk, or join in on Coca-Cola movie trivia. This exhibit truly has visitors stepping right on into Coke’s 135 year history.
Icons
This section is all about the things that make Coca-Cola…iconic! There are displays on the famous font script, on how Santa became associated with the brand, on the development of the famous contour bottle - but the highlight of Icons is not what you see, but who you see - one of the top icons himself, the famous polar bear. Not gonna lie, I was really jazzed for this photo, and the polar bear was very excited that I was wearing my Coca-Cola polar bear t-shirt. And as an FYI, with the guided tour you get to skip the photo line, which can get quite long. You can snap photos with the bear with your smartphone for no charge, but you can also get the professional shots which come with a variety of iconic background choices. I had to get these, I loved them all.
There were a half dozen more backgrounds as well!
Scent Discovery
As the name implies, the Scent Discovery gallery is all about using your nose to journey trough flavor. We first played a game where we worked on identifying smells by watching a screen and pressing the correct buttons at our stations.
The second part of the exhibit is the scent library, where you learn about 5 scent categories: fruity, floral, citrus, woody, and spicy. Then by rotating the display, you learn about Coca-Cola beverages from around the world that incorporate the corresponding scent profile. A neat way to learn about what goes into creating the products.
Taste It!
The guided tour finishes in, what for many, is the highlight of the experience, the Coca-Cola Beverage Tasting Experience - Taste It! The fountain beverages here feature over a hundred products from all over the world, some of which are only sold in those specific countries.
You can spend as much time as you like here, and drink as much as you want. Just grab a cup and get to it! There’s a QR code you can scan to learn more about some of the featured options. I think my favorite was Romania’s Sprite Cucumber, but they were all good, I don’t think there were any that I actually disliked. When you’re done tasting, there are some Coca-Cola freestyle machines toward the gallery exit, if somehow you are still thirsty after all that beverage sampling.
Coca-Cola Store
As any museum does, the World of Coca-Cola ends with a giant gift shop. The Coca-Cola Atlanta store is smaller than its sister shops in Las Vegas and Orlando, but it’s still pretty big, and filled with Coca-Cola kitsch of every possible genre.
If you love the brand, the gift shop really is pretty fun and exciting, making a great finale to the overall experience. You can decorate your whole house and build a whole new wardrobe with all Coca-Cola themed merch here. Somehow I managed to walk out of the shop with just a couple of items. I was pretty proud of my own restraint.
Do note that the shop is accessible to the public as well, you do not need to have a museum ticket to shop here.
Thoughts & Review
So there you have it! The World of Coca-Cola. Amazing interactive museum, or are you just paying Coke to experience 2 floors of relentless company advertising? I’ll admit I am biased. I’ve always been such a Coca-Cola fan, and as I said at the start, visiting the World of Coca-Cola has been on my bucket list since I was a kid. My kitchen is vintage Coca-Cola themed, and few things are more satisfying to me than an ice cold coke in a glass bottle on a warm summer’s day. So was this experience with it? Well… yeah!
My weird personal brand loyalty aside, Coca-Cola is a big part of American pop culture history, and the museum provides a lot of interesting detail on how that came to be. Even if you’re not a pop culture history buff or a big fan of Coca-Cola products, the museum has become so high tech that I think you can have a good time here even without a strong interest in the brand or its history. The galleries are filled with exhibits that are just plain old fun! I would also recommend doing the guided tour. The extra cost was worth it. The tour provided some nice perks, and since time was a factor for me on the day of my visit, being able to skip the lines, plus getting to hold the Olympic torch, made the additional cost well worth it for me. The World of Coca-Cola is definitely a massive love letter from the brand to itself, but it’s also just a really entertaining experience and is a unique only-in-Atlanta attraction. Just go early on in the day, and come thirsty.
Atlanta's World of Coca-Cola | The Video
I’ve also got a video on my experience at the World of Coca-Cola. Some of the exhibits have changed and become more high-tech since my visit, but the video will still give you a great idea of what to expect when you go.
Comments