How Coca-Cola won the war

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-american-gustation-crisis-of-1985

by Ardit20 • 16 years ago

101 82 16 years ago

Figs• 16 years ago

In the future, could you please remove the #more-... anchor from the links? They jump you into the middle of the article, which is somewhat annoying.

Ardit20• 16 years ago

Yeah sorry realised that after I posted when I tested the link but unfortunately you can not edit links apparently.

dwwoelfel• 16 years ago

The following is from a blog that no longer exists, except in my Google Reader archive. Its author worked in a flavor factory that produced Coke:

"I’ll explain why Pepsi sucks so bad, yet somehow manages to win taste tests. If you take Coke and Pepsi side by side in a blind test, Pepsi will win. This is because the bad taste of Pepsi cumulates from several sips (it is an aftertaste effect). So even though I hate Pepsi, I can take a sip or two and enjoy it. After half a can, I’m grossed out. Coke on the other hand tastes good no matter how much you drink, because its aftertaste is the same as its, uh… during taste. Thus, Coke is also better for mixing (who likes rum and Pepsi? Anyone?) because its taste is a constant. People who are expert tasters can tell Pepsi is garbage from sip one. But mortals like you and I fall for the trick, allowing Pepsi to claim that it wins taste tests."

ugh• 16 years ago

Pepsi seems very dry to me – which works for wine but not exactly for sugar water. That dryness is very hard to notice if you only take a sip.

yesimahuman• 16 years ago

Not sure if that applies to Pepsi Max, which is awesome.

fizx• 16 years ago

Remember Crystal Pepsi?

PidGin128• 16 years ago

Also exists in the Internet Archive.

The previous paragraph mentioned the flavoring of cassia, and the following mentioned how sugar holds the flavor.

http://web.archive.org/web/20061031105033/http://theprimacyo...

stcredzero10• 16 years ago

This is a fantastic analogy for culture and media!

axod5• 16 years ago

Coke has a horrible aftertaste IMHO. I can't drink much of it at all. Pepsi is far sweeter. Pepsi Max is the best though.

technomancy• 16 years ago

> Coke has a horrible aftertaste IMHO.

True, but these tests were done when they still used sugar.

petercooper• 16 years ago

Taste is hilariously subjective. Pepsi Max tastes, to me, how cat piss smells. That said, Diet Coke is even worse.. perhaps I'm overly sensitive to artificial sweeteners in some way.

memetichazard• 16 years ago

I've never noticed any particular aftertaste from Coke or Pepsi, but I have noticed that with Pepsi I get that 'sickly-sweet' taste after about half a can, which I don't get with Coke.

mattmanser• 16 years ago

I have read before that the reason that Pepsi wins is because it is sweeter and when asked to compare two drinks people have no way to base the choice on apart from sweetness.

Thus they choose pepsi.

Outside of contrived taste tests though, people actually prefer the taste of coca-cola but can't quantify why.

jerf• 16 years ago

I think few people actually know how to taste food or drink. I'm not sure I'm one of them, since I'm having to teach myself. You have to make sure the smell of the food strongly makes it into your nose, which tends to happen only weakly by itself. The best technique I've got so far involves taking a bit, inhaling a lungfull slowly through my mouth passing through the food as much as possible, then slowly exhaling through my nose while returning to chewing, which works great except for the bit where you are "eating with your mouth open" (though it isn't gaping and nobody seems to have noticed, I still feel wrong). Pedestrian foods become good and great foods become stellar this way.

Do this and almost anybody could probably tell Coke and Pepsi apart. Just take a swig from each without inhaling it, though, and you'll just get the tongue, which isn't very discriminatory at all, and you just get "sweet" and "bubbly".

Do this and you'll also understand why Coke is preferable. Pepsi is guy on a viola, Coke is a string quartet. Both are frankly pretty limited in the grand scale of things, but Coke is at least complete.

ars• 16 years ago

Not to me. I hate the taste of coke - it tastes like acid to me. I like pepsi much better. (And I'm not talking about just a few sips.)

old-gregg• 16 years ago

This doesn't explain why Coke tastes much, much better in Europe: when I'm traveling I always enjoy Coke. But when I'm back to US I tend to avoid soft drinks entirely - they all taste like gasoline here.

I lived in Texas for a while and I remember people were always looking for Mexican Coke: some gas stations would stock it. It was significantly more expensive, about $2 per bottle, and indeed, it had the taste of the real thing.

Could this dramatic degradation in quality be explained by HFCS alone?

sp332• 16 years ago

Yup. Not everyone realizes how much flavor the various sweeteners add to a drink, aside from sweetness. That's one of the reasons it's so hard to develop a decent artificial sweetener - there are lots of "sweet" chemicals, but not many have a good flavor.

antidaily• 16 years ago

sugar versus corn syrup

stcredzero10• 16 years ago

There's also much more awareness about flavors on the continent than in the US. The greater relative persistence of traditional food processing methods in Europe and the greater preponderance of industrialized food production in the US mean that industrial food manufacturers can simply get away with more in the US. The population here has been more conditioned to accept it.

I find that much the same is true with sensitivity to micro-pulse within rhythm. A large portion of the North American public hasn't a clue such a thing exists. Heck, a lot of North Americans don't understand how to clap in time on the downbeat! (Unfortunately, you can also find the same cluelessnes in Europe pretty easily as well. The counterpart cluefulness is much easier to find there, though.)

axod5• 16 years ago

This is also why all cheese in the US tastes to Europeans like plastic. It's extremely surprising that people actually buy cheese in the US, and they seem to have it with everything as well :/

To anyone who has tasted real cheese, it's just bizarre.

The other oddity is chocolate. In the US it seems to come universally without any milk or sugar added. Hersheys is bitter. Even the "Cadburys" (made under license) is quite hard to eat, and not anything like real chocolate.

And agreed. HFCS tastes pretty gross compared to the same drink with real sugar.

patio11• 16 years ago

There's also much more awareness about flavors on the continent than in the US.

Somebody needs to write a book on how food is now essentially a method of values signaling which has some ancillary nutritional effects.

defdac• 16 years ago

"Heck, a lot of North Americans don't understand how to clap in time on the downbeat! (Unfortunately, you can also find the same cluelessnes in Europe pretty easily as well."

This should be written more about. I always find it annoying people clap on the downbeat here in Sweden, or even more annoying - on every single beat like it's some sort of march. Interesting subject!

tomjen3• 16 years ago

Either than or the water - Coke has been running campaigns that it is still their original 100 year old recipe (in Europe) so I highly doubt they have changed it, just to piss of the US ('cept the sugar thing) ,

spudlyo• 16 years ago

I'd certainly love to try the oldest version of the formula that doesn't use 'spent' coca leaves.

what• 16 years ago

Stock up on Kosher Coke during Passover, made with real sugar.

trickjarrett• 16 years ago

I stockpiled Heritage DP for this reason expecting them to pull it back off the market. Was up to twenty 12 packs at one point. Eventually ran through them all, thankfully it can still be found in stores.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

Interestingly, Coca-Cola consumption in the US and Canada has gone down in the last decade, I wonder how much of that can be attributed to the use of HFCS.

http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/ourcompany/ar/pdf/2009-pe...

liamkf• 16 years ago

None can be attributed in Canada... it still uses sugar here.

archon• 16 years ago

I think the HFCS is a big factor.

Mountain Dew recently ran a limited-time version of their drink made with normal sugar instead of HFCS. It was, at least to my taste buds, much better than the normal HFCS version. I hate the normal version of Mountain Dew, but that "real sugar" version was amazing.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

It wasn't the best thing I ever had, especially because it was new and unfamiliar, but it was quite enjoyable and very very noticeably different.

joezydeco2• 16 years ago

I loved MD Throwback too. It tasted a lot "cleaner" to me, not as syrupy.

joezydeco2• 16 years ago

I wish Coke would bring the European formulation of Orange Fanta to the US. Much lighter, cleaner, tastes great, and isn't this dense syrupy mess that we get with Fanta or Sunkist here.

I think euroFanta also has juice in it like Orangina. Probably explains why it's just cheaper to use HFCS here.

pmjordan• 16 years ago

It's interesting, in southern Africa, Coke tastes different still. The best explanation I can come up with is that they use cane sugar rather than sugar from beet.

poundy• 16 years ago

Coca-Cola outsells Pepsi in most parts of the U.S., notable exceptions being central Appalachia, North Dakota, and Utah. In the city of Buffalo, New York, Pepsi outsells Coca-Cola by a two-to-one margin.

Overall, Coca-Cola continues to outsell Pepsi in almost all areas of the world. However, exceptions include India; Saudi Arabia; Pakistan, the Dominican Republic; Guatemala the Canadian provinces of Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island; and Northern Ontario

brunoc• 16 years ago

Here's an interesting tidbit of canadian culture.

As mentioned above in Quebec Pepsi outsells Coke by quite a bit. This is how the "peppers" nickname for Quebecers came to be. Or at least that how the legend goes.

eli2• 16 years ago

Well, of course. There's a Pepsi bottling plant in Buffalo. I'm sure Coke outsells Pepsi by an obscene margin in Atlanta.

nirmal• 16 years ago

It does. Also as far as the Georgia Tech campus goes you won't find a Pepsi vending machine anywhere. Even the on-campus Pizza Hut sells Coke.

joe_bleau• 16 years ago

My absolute favorite coke vs. pepsi taste test story is near the end of this blog post (search for "About 10 years ago I did a year long part-time course in quality assurance"): http://davesmechanicalpencils.blogspot.com/2006/11/pentel-ai...

sjs2• 16 years ago

I used to prefer Pepsi when I was younger, and whenever I did the Pepsi challenges I could always taste the difference. I remember some of my friends couldn't distinguish them so it clearly depends on the person.

Pepsi is a bit sweeter. Or was, I don't drink soft drinks very often these days.

marcinw2• 16 years ago

I don't know what's better... the Coke vs Pepsi story in the article, or the fact that this entire website is dedicated to mechanical pencils.

thethimble• 16 years ago

Mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8Owe47L...

tron_carter• 16 years ago

In my stats class in school, I volunteered for the coke vs. pepsi blind taste test. I had to guess which was which, and I was right 9/10 trials. Teacher was a bit shocked at that, calling me an outlier.

gaius• 16 years ago

Pepsi is sweeter. It tastes better for one mouthful, but Coke wins in the market because most people find an entire can of Pepsi too sweet.

thereddestruby• 16 years ago

Coke always tastes better out of a glass bottle than a can, as well.

whakojacko• 16 years ago

Is this really true? If so, why would it be? Ive had friends say that, but Ive only had Coke from glass that was from Mexico/Europe and hence had real sugar, which is obviously better for a completely different reason.

dzlobin• 16 years ago

This is true for most things. There is a reason specific wines have specific glasses, as does beer and whisky.

Taste is overwhelmingly defendant on smell, so drinking it out of a bottle where your nose is not in much contact with the aroma, and drinking it out of a glass where your nose is almost next to the drink, are two entirely different sensation.

For example budweiser in a bottle/can, is very bad; almost gasoline-y like bud light, natty ice. Out of a proper glass though its much smoother and lighter tasting, not bad at all.

aw3c2• 16 years ago

No. That is a matter of taste. A friend of mine prefers it out of the can.

marcinw2• 16 years ago

I've always preferred the taste of Coke out of a can to any other cola. Pepsi is too sweet, and it has a slightly different aftertaste; Coke on the otherhand, tastes pretty consistent throughout, making it an excellent choice as a mixer. I don't know how people can like Coke out of a glass bottle though... it has always tasted too flat for me.

Anyone ever notice how Subway (chain restaurant) always has a different tasting Coke than what you're used to? I could never figure out why they consistently screw up the mix.

Revisor• 16 years ago

It's an interesting read from a marketing point of view, but as for our health, coke (oversweetened dilluted acid), chips (carcinogenic fried potato dough with monosodium glutamate) and sweet chocolate are the most unhealthy things one can inflict upon oneself. I have never understood some of my friends, gulping litres of coke everyday, basically drinking nothing else.

I for myself prefer tap water (capital city, central Europe).

zeynel1• 16 years ago

'Although the foods were identical aside from their wrappings, the children said they preferred the taste of the McDonald’s-branded burgers, carrots, and apple juice in the vast majority of tests.'

interesting

How Coca-Cola won the war

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