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Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix
Did you know that New Coke is used as a punchline every eleven seconds? OK, that’s not true. And neither are any of these rumors of the real story behind The (New) Real Thing:
- New Coke was a plot to switch from sugar-sweetened Coke to much more inexpensive high fructose corn syrup, “a theory that was supposedly given credence by the apparently different taste of Coke Classic when it first hit the market (The U.S. sugar trade association took out a full-page ad lambasting Coke for using HFCS in all bottling of the old formula when it was reintroduced.)”
- New Coke “provided cover for the final removal of all coca derivatives from the product to placate the Drug Enforcement Administration, which was trying to eradicate the plant worldwide to combat an increase in cocaine trafficking and consumption.”
- New Coke was introduced “to re-assert Coca-Cola’s logo trademark, which was due to expire in 1985, 100 years after the logo had first been trademarked.”
- New Coke was a scheme to allow its primary owners “to buy back shares, un-diluting the company’s ownership. Once sufficient shares had been purchased or taken off the market, ‘Classic’ Coke was returned to market to drive the stock price back up.”
- New Coke was developed as a preemptive strike “against Pepsi Supreme, which was to have tasted more like Coke as a way to increase Pepsi’s market share. By pulling a similar move themselves, Coke guaranteed that any move by Pepsi would look like mere imitation and thus headed off a challenge to its flagship drink.”
This next part is true. New Coke eventually became Coke II. I could have sworn my family had a few Coke II six-packs between 1990 and 1992, and that’s right around the time New Coke became the sequel.
Coke Deuce was not discontinued in the U.S. until 2002, and is still available in far corners of the Federated States of Micronesia (specifically Yap).
While we are on this subject of cokes does anyone remember Crystal Pepsi? Maybe the fact that the commercial featured the Van Halen song “right now” will jolt a memory? …Anyone?
posted by Jarred Hanson on 1-11-2007 at 12:25 pm
Right now, I can’t get that song out of my head. The Crystal Pepsi ad featuring Van Halen, which premiered during Super Bowl XXVII in 1993, is over at YouTube. Just search “Crystal Pepsi.”
I could not find the SNL “Crystal Gravy” parody. Sorry.
posted by Jason on 1-11-2007 at 12:33 pm
i actually have a bottle of crystal pepsi on my desk right now. because it came in glass bottles, it has long outlasted its 1994 expiration date.
truth be told, i cracked open a bottle at a wedding last summer. it wasn’t that good.
posted by evan on 1-11-2007 at 3:22 pm
How many MF readers were actually around when that happened (and remember it?)
One theory that you missed, and the one that I’ve always believed to be the true story, is that Coca Cola orchestrated the whole thing to both solidify their “user base”, and to shut down the Pepsi Challenge campaign in one fell swoop.
If I remember correctly, it all happened when Pepsi was at the high point of their campaign, which consisted of blind taste tests between Coke & Pepsi. The campaign was showing some success, with many people saying they preferred the taste of Pepsi over Coke. Coke responds by coming up with a new recipe that just happens to taste a lot like Pepsi, rolling it out with much hoopla and promises/threats that the old Coke is gone. Die-hard Coke drinkers overwhelmingly reject the new product. Coke humbly follows its customers wishes by dumping the new flavor and returning to the original.
Just as planned.
And it worked. Before the New Coke subterfuge, Pepsi’s market share was exceeding Coke’s in some markets, and a close second everywhere else. Coke firmly trounced Pepsi thereafter.
posted by Dave on 1-11-2007 at 9:36 pm
I was in college when it happened — just outside of Atlanta, in fact — so it was a huge deal there (since that’s the brand’s headquarters).
When they heard the news, I remember several friends’ parents going out and buying up all the “old” Coke they could so that they wouldn’t be forced to consume the new stuff. A few of them actually bought enough to last until Coca-Cola Classic was introduced a few months later.
And, I’ll say this: Anyone who hasn’t tried Coke out of a glass bottle from a soda machine that’s cranked up really cold, so that there’s just a hint of ice in the neck, hasn’t really had Coke. It’s just not as good in cans or those blasted plastic bottles.
posted by Sandy on 1-12-2007 at 10:45 am
You can still get Coke sweetened with cane sugar by importing it from Mexico or Central America. It tastes like in the good ole days. And yes, it’s in glass bottles, the way God intended .
posted by Michael on 2-21-2008 at 9:38 am
A friend of mine, years ago, took me past his great-uncle’s house where he asked us if either of us youngin’s had ever had a REAL Coke.
So he took us to his basement and revealed a stockpile of well-preserved ye olde Coke. According to him, it was bottled sometime in the late sixties or somewhere near there. He had them preserved in a little cold room and when he pulled out a couple of bottles to give us, they tasted SO DAMN GOOD.
Much better than the battery acid we have to drink these days.
Woefully, when he died, his son sold most of it to avid collectors for far less value than the pure happiness that stuff could cause.
posted by Nerdfury on 2-21-2008 at 5:36 pm
Coke should also be in a 6oz. glass bottle. Hawaiian bottled 7-Up uses cane sugar and it’s fantastic. Don’t know about coke there, I drink Pepsi. It is bottled in Copenhagen with real sugar and tastes as close as you can get to what I grew up with. btw, Schlitz had a new bean counter change their product over to 100% corn syrup–no malt sugar, never recovered. Con Agra, and Archer Daniels, took America’s taste buds hostage years ago, we’re still paying the ransom.
posted by dleet on 2-22-2008 at 7:11 am
I was one of the people who vehemently protested the discontinuance of real Coke. My feelings were that if I wanted something that tasted like flat Pepsi, I’d buy Pepsi and open it long before I drank it. You’ll never convince me that it wasn’t a deliberate ploy to introduce HFCS-flavored Coke. But, when they reissued the new “Coka Cola Classic” it tasted so much better than “Coke” that I was satisfied. I’m still drinking “Classic” nearly 20 years later.
posted by Classic Lover on 2-24-2008 at 5:37 pm