I have always found Pepsi and Coke to be way to sweet, and the diet versions have a lousy after taste. I often wondered why they couldn’t split the difference and produce a cola product with less sugar.
When Coke and Pepsi did just that I thought it was yhe answer, until I tried Pepsi Edge yesterday and found out that it has Sucralose. WTF? It tastes as if someone took Diet Pepsi and added sugar to it! The worst of both worlds!
Anyone know why a cola with half the regular amount of sugar doesn’t work? Is it bitter? Problems with shelf stability? Terrorist plot?
Try taking a glass of iced tea and adding sugar to it. The first few packages don’t turn it into sweetened tea, but into an odd-tasting nothingness. You need to add way more packages than you think to come up with the proper sweetness.
I think there’s a threshold effect at work. There’s sweet, too sweet, and not sweet enough. Half-sweet mostly doesn’t work for anyone.
Wouldn’t it, then, not be as sweet as the current product? I can’t imagine that it would taste good at all, and I suspect most peoples’ tastes are such that half-sweetened cola would taste terrible to them.
Looks like Exapno Mapcase and Excalibre are likely correct. However, as someone who drinks coffee, tea, etc without any sugar it would be interesting to try cola with 50% less sugar.
Sucralose is a non-caloric sugar substitute. It’s used in Pepsi Edge and the Coke equivalent so that, theoretically, the new products would indeed be just as sweet as the regular but with only half the calories.
While I find that Sucralose - found in yellow packets under the trade name Splenda - works just fine in coffee, and not badly in iced tea, every one of the sucralose-sweetened diet soft drinks I’ve tried has that horrible diet aftertaste that I can’t stand.
I don’t know why this should be, but I’m sure the food chemists are frantically working on it.