Happy 25th birthday, New Coke!

Before my time, or at least my soda-drinking time.

http://www.ajc.com/business/25-years-since-coca-484445.html

 

I was 8 when New Coke came out, and I still remember my dad making fun of New Coke. I also recall going to a Food 4 Less, and literally seeing New Coke cases stacked to the ceiling.

One of the great Epic Fails.

 

Made Bill Cosby look like a damn fool.

 

One of the great anecdotes about New Coke was in the book written about Coca-Cola a couple years ago. Apparently Pepsi's CEO drank some of the product and it tasted just like... Pepsi. My own mother was a Pepsi drinker back then and she drank New Coke for that very reason.

Boy, was that product a bomb.

 

For some reason when I think of New Coke I'm reminded of Max Headroom.

 

That was the whole point of New Coke, though. Pepsi had been running the "Pepsi Taste Test" and over and over the results showed people preferring the taste of Pepsi to Coke - I forget the margin, but it was big.

Coke wanted to change its product to taste like Pepsi. They forgot about that little thing called brand loyalty.

 

Here's my one and only great conspiracy theory.

After the New Coke failed and they decided to go back to the old Coke, they really didn't. The real old Coke was made with sugar.

When they supposedly went back to the "old" Coke, it was sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.

They pulled a fast one.

I drink Diet Coke because I don't like the taste/mouth feel of the new old Coke.

Mexicans are smarter than we are.

 

I remember taking the Pepsi taste test a few times. Nothing like a free drink of soda to spice your day.

There were a ton of commercials about the New Coke, and once I drank it, I wondered what the fuss was about.

 

Coke's history of introducing new versions of the flagship drink is pretty bizarre.

They wanted to bring in a diet cola in the early 1960s, but the stuff they came up with tasted like such shit they didn't want to attach the "Coca-Cola" name to it, so they came up with TAB ("The Alternate Beverage").

Finally, 20 years later, they came up with a diet cola formulation they deemed adequate to call Diet Coke, then some genius came up with the bright idea: "Hey, let's completely change over the formula for Coca-Cola (by far the most popular soft drink in the world) so it tastes like our new untested diet drink."

Which of course was developed primarily to taste mostly like ... Pepsi.

It only took them 20 more years for some wizard to come up with a real brainstorm: "Hey, ya know, here's an idea -- why don't we come up with a diet drink that actually tastes like, uhhh... Coca-Cola??"



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Fountain machinery at fast-food joints has a limited number of nozzles. Unless or until Zero overtakes Diet Coke or one of the other flavors in popularity, or one of the major franchise chains retools with fountain machinery with more nozzles, it will be hard for it to break onto the Mickey D's menu.

I would guess the sales of Zero may be getting close to those of Diet Coke, although that might just be my personal taste.