Ted Ryan has a habit that drives his family nuts.

They’re quietly watching a movie together when all of a sudden Ted grabs the remote, backs up the film, freezes on a specific frame and takes a photo, which he later posts on Facebook. His wife and children roll their eyes and patiently wait for him to resume the movie.

The object of Ted’s attention? A Coca-Cola sign in the background of a scene, or an actor wearing a Coke T-shirt or drinking from the instantly recognized bottle. The interruptions happen again and again whenever Ted sees red. Anything Coke, anytime it appears.

“Coca-Cola is in my blood,” he says.

It’s also on his resumé. Ted is Coke’s director of “heritage communications,” better known as the company’s chief archivist, the keeper of the more than a century’s worth of folklore built around the world’s most iconic brand.

The archive is not the World of Coke, a popular tourist attraction a short walk but a world apart from the archives at The Coca-Cola Company’s headquarters in downtown Atlanta. The World of Coke is a museum-like display of the past enjoyed by a million or so visitors a year. The archives are a vast repository inaccessible to outsiders but actively mined by the company. The belief that the past really is prologue makes this collection of what has come before a catalyst to what is yet to be.

That’s unusual. Lots of companies assemble and preserve their pasts. Instead, Coca-Cola actively studies the past to inform and inspire its future.

“We’re here to help understand our history as a source of ideas for something new,” Ted says of his team in the archives. “We evoke the past to put it to work in the present.”