Just recently, Pepsi announced a new low-carb creation, Pepsi Edge. Pepsi Edge is guaranteed to contain half the sugar, carbohydrates, and calories of the popular soft drink, thereby eliminating dangerous and unhealthy sources of taste. This innovative marketing strategy is now poised to join the low-carb landslide already rolling merrily along with Subway's new wraps, Hardee's new breakfast bowl, and McDonald's new policy of not selling food to fatties for fear of litigation.
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This is one thing I am really grateful for my parents about. Growing up, we rarely had soda in the house. When we did, it was a special treat. As a result, I have very few emotional attachments to over-priced sugar water. I'm not meaning to sound condescending here, but it blows my mind how much they are able to charge for a fountain drink.
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You MUST be from Georgia, Chris. That's the state where NO ONE can drink anything besides Coke. (Texas is Dr. Pepper.)
It's not that much, Porteiro, considering you get free refills. I'm guessing that, within a decade or so, they will give the soda away for free with the meals. (Charging the same price, of course.)
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I don't get out Pepsi and Coke have both come out with bottled water and charge the same price for them as they do for soda.
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I am a Dr. Pepper fan, but Coke distributors often take the Dr. Pepper franchise with them (not sure how that works), so I love to see the "Coke" signs in restaurants.
I love sody.
Yay Chris!
Is it my imagination, or are your articles getting smaller? Not fair! Plus, I think you should be a daily. Just sayin'
*grin*
Thanks for making my Wednesday so Wonderful.
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Writer's remorse -- IMHO, this was my weakest column yet, mainly because I could have gone on for days about growing up in a Coke household, the history of the cola wars, the reasons behind New Coke, the Atkins fads (just heard the FDA is stepping in to define what "low-carb" mean, as many foods have been falsely advertising) and I never got a good "voice" for what came out.
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Aww, Chris, it may be the fangirl in me coming out, but I really did enjoy your column this week. But too short. *grin* It's not the best one you've written, but it's a good one.
I would love to hear more about Your Life With Coke (ooh, that sounds naughty! ), maybe you could try the article again, and post it here on Hatrack?
Or email it just to me?
*gives Chris the 'puppy eyes'*
(I'm not really scarystalkery, I promise, I just appreciate excellent columnists)
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quote:It's not that much, Porteiro, considering you get free refills.
That only matters if you want to drink a lot of the stuff. Even when I get a pop with free refills, half the time I only drink one glass. When I'm at a resturaunt, I want to fill my belly with yummy food, not with soda that I can drink at home.
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I wonder how many decades will pass before the public realizes that New Coke was the most brilliant (or lucky) marketing move ever, and that this hugely successful move literally saved the Coca Cola company.
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We once had cheap soda at our house, my nephew threw a fit.
His favorite joke (my nephews, and my brothers).
Do you know what the code for Pepsi Products is in Coke? PP (Pepsi Products). Do you really want to drink PP?
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quote:When I'm at a resturaunt, I want to fill my belly with yummy food, not with soda that I can drink at home.
So you can't eat yummy food at home? Beverly, I think it's time to use the heavy artillery (meaning cooking skills, not extreme violence or some other thing that dirty OOC-readers would think up).
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Goat, are you trying to make my life difficult?
But while I very much enjoy my wife's cooking, she doesn't know how to make most of the foods that I eat at a resturaunt.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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My columns tend to run from 600-640 words. This one was 633, but had fewer, larger paragraphs than I usually use so it looks shorter.
Since I'd like to start angling towards print after I have a year's worth of practice, I need to start capping them at 600 words or so. This is tougher than you'd imagine. Just when you start going...
My dad worked for RC Cola for a brief time when i was four or five, something I only remember because he kept bringing home inflatable RC mascots, little 3' kings that I would blow up and assemble into an easily-knocked-over army. From then on he was at Coke, and he was loyal to his job. He turned a fellow employee in once, after seeing him drinking a Pepsi on the job while still wearing his Coke uniform. He'd also come home with bleeding scratches on his arms from the broken glass in his van. He generally didn't notice unitl the dog jumped up and started licking him, then he'd call me for first aid detail. I never understood how this was possible until I got a job at a building materials store years later and started coming home with cuts and bruises I didn't notice at the time. My aunt, who lived in Durham, NC, was just as devout a Pepsi drinker, which led to good-natured rivalry when she visited. She'd bring her own, and Dad would allot her a portion of the refrigerator space as long as they didn't touch anything else and "contaminate it." I'm pretty sure he was joking...
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Mrs. M- Sweet tea is so disgusting. I don't mind putting a bit of sugar in my iced tea, but the restaurant I worked at made us put a five-pound-bag of sugar in ONE of those big tea brewer things. And the tea was hot, so the sugar got ropy and syrupy. We were constantly on the look-out for roaches.
For that reason alone I'm afraid to eat at restaurants in the south anymore.
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By the numbers, New Coke was an excellent idea. Sales in Coca Cola had been dropping for ten years. partly because of pepsi's popularity, and partly because Diet Coke was selling so well. Still their product, but by taking sales away from the flagship brand it allowed Pepsi to advertise that more people drank Pepsi than Coke. This fit in nicely with their Pepsi Challenge campaign, and Coke was not doing well at all.
What they did was a little weird. When they made Diet Coke, they avoided the usual technique of "dieting" a product by replacing the sugar with sweetener and jiggering the taste until it was close to the original. Instead they started over and just made a better-tasting diet cola, and it worked. It also tasted quite a bit more like Pepsi (smoother, sweeter). Plus they had these surveys, Pepsi's and their own, which seemed to show that more people really did prefer the taste of Pepsi. So when it came time to think about how best to recapture the market, the best idea seemed to be to undiet Diet Coke. In a bit of reversal of the usual diet-version tradition they took the formula for Diet Coke and replaced the sweetener with corn syrup and jiggered the taste. The result? New Coke, which tested better than old Coke in every taste-test they did. According to their tests, there was no way this could fail.
Problem was, their studies asked people if they liked the taste. They didn't ask if they liked it as a replacement. The Coke company was staggered when people reacted so strongly to an American icon being thrown away like that. You don't mess with Coke, no matter what the blind taste tests say. I think it was something like 79 days from the introduction of new Coke to the announcement, by Peter Jennings doing a special report, that Coke Classic would be brought back.
About a month into the new promotion we were lost between two small towns in central Florida and we stopped at an old gas station. Hot, tired, dejected. Right in front of the register was a half-barrel full of ice and... vintage Coke. If we'd had a way to refrigerate them, we'd have bought the lot. As it was we got drunk on the stuff.
The fact that Coke bounced back from this debacle is more of a testament to the brand name than anything else.
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Mostly right, except for your statement that there was a debacle to bounce back from. The introduction of New Coke created this wave of nostalgia for the old Coke, so that when Classic Coke was reintroduced (not the exact same formula, btw) its sales went through the roof. So then, it wasn't bouncing back from the debacle, their later success was caused by the "debacle."
-o-
And Diet Pepsi tastes much better than Diet Coke.
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Chris, thanks for the link to your sweet tea article. A Bonus Wednesday!
I, sadly, am not a Southerner. Even though I am from *Southern* California, this means nothing. I must protest that through a mistake in geography, I was born in Upland, CA; but my maternal family's history is deeply Southern, and so I claim the right of inheritance.
As long as it gets me plenty of sweet tea.
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I have to disagree, it was a debacle. The fact that it rebounded wildly in their favor doesn't change that.
And I have to debunk the "changed formula" story because I used to believe it too. From the snopes page on Cokelore:
"An interesting little claim sprang up in the wake of the introduction of Classic Coke, one having to do with its sweetener. People swore they detected a change in the flavor between Classic Coke and the original. This gave rise to the rumor that the product had been reformulated, dropping cane sugar in favor of high fructose corn syrup. Depending upon whom you listened to, either the demand for the return of original Coca-Cola afforded the company the opportunity to switch from cane sugar to corn syrup or the whole fiasco of taking original Coca-Cola off the shelves and reintroducing it three months later as Classic Coke was all a brilliant scheme to mask the change in sweetener. According to whispered wisdom, the company had hoped to slip the modification past consumers by having it take place during the original beverage's absence from the shelves. People would be so darned glad to have Classic Coke back that they wouldn't notice it didn't taste the same as original Coca-Cola. (Another twist to this rumor had it that New Coke had deliberately been formulated to taste awful in order to facilitate the switch — this supposedly gave Coca-Cola an excuse for pulling the original formula and then putting it back on the market after a brief absence, making it look all along as if they were simply responding to consumer demands.)
The change in sweetener wasn't anything that diabolical. Corn syrup was cheaper than cane sugar; that's what it came down to. In 1980, five years before the introduction of New Coke, half the cane sugar in Coca-Cola had been replaced with high fructose corn syrup. By six months prior to New Coke's knocking the original Coca-Cola off the shelves, there was no cane sugar in American Coca-Cola. Whether they knew it or not, what consumers were drinking then was 100% sweetened by high fructose corn syrup."
I believe Coke with sugar is still available in those areas where cane sugar is cheaper than corn syrup, such as Mexico.
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In what way have you debunked it? That exerpt says that the formula changed! I didn't ascribe motive to it, I just said it wasn't really the same formula.
-o-
Honestly, I'm finding Scopes weaker and weaker lately.
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In any case, the Washington Post article where I first read about the change in sugars didn't talk about cane sugar, it talked about maltose and some other kind of -ose if I remember correctly.
-o-
I agree, though, that the claim that New Coke was purposely made to taste "bad" was absurd. As you noted, taste test after taste test indicated that people preferred the taste of it. It probably was not shrewdness but incredible luck, but the fact remains that it was incredibly beneficial to Coca Cola.
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See, Chris, I grew up with sweet tea and I STILL don't understand it. I drink iced tea with a bit of sugar, and it only seems to take a little to cut the bitterness, for me. The stuff we made at the restaurants was just syrup. Nasty.
I think your problem is the way you brew it. I'm guessing you brew it quick and take the bags out early?
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The point wasn't that they hadn't changed their formula -- they have, and several times over the years -- but that the change had nothing to do with New Coke. It had already been happening over a period of years before, it just got more notice during the New Coke fiasco.
It definitely wasn't shrewdness. For one thing, the Coke company is on record as admitting they screwed up big time (although they said it after Coke soared back up, after it was safe). And I can't imagine anyone being able to predict that kind of a turnaround, or be willing to take such a chance even if they did.
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Heh heh. Okay. I brew mine correctly, so I don't have to worry about much bitterness. Hence, no need for disgusting ropes in my tea.
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
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quote:And Diet Pepsi tastes much better than Diet Coke.
Please say this is some kind of joke, Joe. We have staff lunch meetings every Monday at my office with about a dozen people attending. About half drink diet and everyone of us has requested that the Diet Pepsi be thrown out and the Diet Coke brought back.
Pepsi One, however, beats them both. That one little calorie it's got must do the trick.
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I usually separate Coke and Pepsi in my mind and try not to compare them, but I tend to choose Coke over Pepsi...I just like it better. In the same way that I choose DP over Coke. But I have to go on the record of saying that Diet Coke is disgusting and I would drink Diet Pepsi everyday of the week if it would mean I could skip Diet Coke altogether.
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To be brutally honest -- and I'm only admitting this because my dad is long dead -- I do occasionally drink Mountain Dew. But Pepsi continues to taste like sweet stale Coke to me.
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quote:Hence, no need for disgusting ropes in my tea.
Tea in bags? disgusting! Loose leaf all the way! Crazy Europeans, take our idea of tea and still get it wrong, you white devils are barbarians.
I loved the article, Mayday, who has given up Hatrack for lent is very grateful for you articles too a little piece of hatrack when she can't get any otherwise. Satyagraha
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Ya know, I still believe that JOLT COLA has never gotten the following it deserves. When the brand was launched, it had the highest caffeine content of any soda AND they used sugar in the recipe instead of corn syrup.
I still remember their commercial pitch:
JOLT: ALL the sugar and TWICE the caffeine!
They've managed to find a market niche of purists that keep them afloat, though.
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quote: McDonald's new policy of not selling food to fatties for fear of litigation
The line between reality and sarcasm is so skewed since the McDonald's coffee incident that I actually have to ask if the above is a joke or an actual defensive strategy of the McDonald's corporation.
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sndrake: Did you know that Jolt makes a caffeine GUM now?? The cadets (at west point where I work and live) go crazy for it. *shakes head*
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I did not know that and will do my best to forget.
One of my many idisyncracies is an intense dislike of gum. As a little kid, I would throw a fit if my mom tried to chew some around me - or my dad, or anyone.
Da, I think its more that I like different things than my husband, so I tend to make the things I like more often. For instance, I can't stand mushrooms, so he suffers from a deep mushroom deficit in his diet. Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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I'm guessing you brew it quick and take the bags out early?
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Loose leaf all the way! Crazy Europeans, take our idea of tea and still get it wrong, you white devils are barbarians.
