I think cola in it’s natural state has sort of a “slightly dirty puddle” color, which isn’t very appatizing.
Pepsi One is ok. It tases slightly less like malted battery acid (thanks, Bloom County than most diet sodas, but not by much. It’s still no contest between it and Diet Dr.Pepper, and the king of all diet sodas, Diet Cherry Coke.
Which is, unfortunatly, impossible to find, barring special orders. It’s like finding Mr. Pib in Maine. In the unlikely event you WANTED to find Mr. Pib, I mean.
Crystal Pepsi was vile. Did market testing really show there was a demand for a beverage that tasted like liquid polyurathane?
I contemplated making a Gundam-based “Pepsi Zero” joke, but decided to spare you all.
“You gonna order something, kid?”
“Ah, yeah… Give me a Tab.”
“Tab? I can’t give you a tab unless you order something!”
“All right, give me a Pepsi Free.”
“You want a Pepsi, PAL, you’re gonna pay for it!”
I hunted through the archived columns, but couldn’t find it, and have no idea offhand which book it’s in … but I know that Cecil answered this very question, but it was in regards to Coca-Cola marketing Tab as a diet drink when they already had Diet Coke doing very well.
I think the culmination of the column was “So, basically, Coke paid $50 million to shoot themselves in the foot.”
I leave finding the column as an exercise to the reader.
OK, Pepsi wants to introduce a diet soda with this new sweetener, Ace-K, which many people think tastes better than Nutrasweet. But they can’t just change Diet Pepsi, because a lot of people like it as is, and they saw what happened to Coke when they tried changing the recipe. So they have to invent a new drink, which is Pepsi One.
SmackFu hit the nail on the head with the “why” question.
I hate diet pop and don’t really ever drink it. In my College and earlier days I used to drink an obnoxious volume of the leaded stuff, on the order of 8 cans a day. Always liked Coke the best of the straight colas but was never really picky. However in one stint in the last year where I wanted to get serious about cutting a little weight for summer, I tried shifting to diet and really the only one that could keep me satisfied was Pepsi One. I think it is the best of the Diets, and I’d say that the new sweetener is better than Nutrasweet. And I think that those people really offended by the taste are probably just very accustomed to Nurtasweet diet products. But from someone who is basically a regular pop drinker switching to diet, the new product might be a success.
In the long run however, it was still a crappy diet so I went back to teh real stuff and decided to just cut it down to a can or two a day, and not a whole 12 pack.