New Coke Didn’t Fail. It Was Murdered.

[conuly]

Fascinating article. All the comments dispute it, of course, swearing that by their own recollection they hated this stuff.

Well, maybe. But people have an amazing ability to misremember things. Was invading Iraq a good idea? Obviously not, and I said it from the start!

Comments

[bibliofile]

I remember when it happened! I knew a few people who were serious caffeine-via-Coke addicts, and they were very upset at the change.

After hearing about the corn syrup thing, I think I always assumed that the company just used New Coke as misdirection to switch from cane sugar to corn syrup. (Insert detailed discussion of US price supports for cane sugar here. Those price supports remain in place even now, which is why corn syrup is still cheaper than cane sugar.)

[conuly]

Everybody thinks that, although, as noted in the article, they made the switch five years prior.

[gatheringrivers]

That explains why I lost my interest in it when I was still in high school...

Thankfully the local megamart actually stocks "MEXICAN" coke - made in Mexico, still made with cane sugar, and packed in glass bottles.

When I get the hankering, I either get a case to stash, or a single cold bottle, and I still check the ingredients to make sure they haven't done a switcheroo too.

[nodrog]

Thank you - I was going to mention that myself.  People may indeed misremember, but one taste of The Real Thing® indeed, and people say, “Oh!” as the synapse-circuits close:  This is the Coca-Cola we grew up with.

[sabotabby]

I was in all the anti-war protests, so I know I was against it (as were most Canadians IIRC, which was why we didn't go in). Afghanistan is a more interesting issue; most were for it (I was also in the anti-war protests for that). I wonder how people remember it now.

I don't think I ever noticed a difference with New Coke, but I remember people being very upset and saying that they hated it.

[conuly]

I don't know if the polls covered Canada. That's an interesting question.

[melita66]

I lived through new coke. I was and am a staunch pepsi drinker but will drink coke if there's nothing else. To me, it tasted like pepsi--sweeter and with less 'bite'.

[conuly]

Plausible - as Mother Jones points out, Pepsi was more popular at the time.

[bitterlawngnome]

At the time I was hanging out with someone doing a marketing degree. They all figured it was the most brilliant piece of anti-marketing they'd ever seen ... all these people willing to swear that (old) Coke was the elixir of life itself.

[conuly]

Pretty sure that's whiskey.

[bitterlawngnome]

We used espresso. Didn't become immortal but my god did we ever talk a lot ...

[nodrog]

JOLT®.  The ad blurb was, “All the sugar and twice the caffeine!”  Nothing said about flavor.  Honesty is refreshing.  So was this, if you didn’t mind your teeth clenching…

[bitterlawngnome]

omg it still exists https://www.joltcola.com

[nodrog]

Oh, well, as to that, so does Compuserve!

https://www.compuserve.com/

They tacitly admit that they’re a retirement home for dial-up-modem users who don’t know Tumblr from Twitter and don’t wish to.  I understand that; Future Shock is a thing.  Hey, you can emulate Windows 3.1 on your modern set-up now, if you want to…

I think the guy is just another one of us suckers.

[cactuswatcher]

I'm convinced that what we have now is in fact "New Coke." I think it was formulated in conjunction with the switch away from the bigger size glass bottles to plastic and the individual size to thinner aluminum cans to reduce the amount of pressure inside the newer containers. Maybe partly to switch to cheaper corn syrup. The idea was always to have it taste much the same, but with less carbon dioxide yielding less acid in the liquid it was going to taste a little different. If you were old enough you'd remember putting your nose over the mouth of a just-opened bottle was part of the experience. You'd get a big blast of tiny bubbles up your nose. Nowadays with much lower pressure in the bottles and cans there is almost nothing.

You might remember Pepsi Slice, a line of fruit flavored soda that failed because it had real fruit juice in it! I thought it was delicious. It was popular with a lot of people, but the shelf life was terrible because the juice would start to turn to wine; not enough that you could taste it, and far too little to make you tipsy, but enough that it would produce enough extra gas to bulge the bottom of an aluminum can outward making it very awkward to set the stuff on the shelves! You'd see the stuff in discount stores with the six-packs leaning every which way. Still perfectly safe and good to drink, but you couldn't put in a vending machine and the retailers didn't want to deal with it.

So "Old Coke" was designed for a certain container pressure. The flavor at soda fountains and any place else they mixed it on the spot was always different. So Coke faced with needing to go to cheaper containers that wouldn't hold what they were currently making came up with new coke, which as we all know people liked just fine in blind taste tests. They made the mistake of announcing they were changing the formula and putting it out while the older product was still on the shelves. If you could compare the two they did taste different. The new was sweeter, partly because it had less carbonation. Yes, I liked the old better.

I stopped drinking so much soda for a while then went back and tasted Coke. It was suspiciously sweeter than I remembered even though they swore they got rid of the New Coke. I wouldn't doubt the syrup at least for a while was a mixture of new and old, gradually over time with more and more new till the old was gone. A Coke from a fountain no longer tastes better than from a plastic bottle, so everybody now is getting the same syrup. It's a conspiracy theory, all right. But I think it happened. Why does Mexican Coke in a glass bottle taste better than what you get in the States? I think it's partly because of higher pressure in the container and so a different taste. I wouldn't be surprised if Mexican Coke were made with corn syrup people would still like it better, than American Coke!

Re: I think the guy is just another one of us suckers.

[gatheringrivers]

FYI - The Mexican Coke I can find is still made with cane sugar. :)

Re: I think the guy is just another one of us suckers.

[conuly]

As is, I believe, Coca Cola for Passover.

[greghousesgf]

I remember new Coke tasting awful but I'm also very aware that almost no one cares about my opinion. :(

[nodrog]

Unless everyone else nods and says, “She’s right, y’ know?” - which they did.

But I’d still drive a AMC Gremlin, if I could travel back to AD 1974 and steal one.  Nyaahh…

[oracleofdoom]

I did say it from the start about Iraq, though. TBH the first time we heard about it, my friends and I were howling with laughter that anyone would think of invading a nation that was completely unrelated to 9/11. We didn't laugh long, though.

[conuly]

Also, Afghanistan, aka "Graveyard of Empires", is yet another land war in Asia. What the hell were we thinking?

(I presume somebody was thinking when steering that ship. This may be a foolish assumption.)

[solarbird]

I also said it from the start, and wrote about it, and marched in the protests. Moreso, I said they had no remaining WMD programme and no substantial WMDs, and in fact couldn't, and that this was obvious if you actually look at the situation.

It didn't help, but at least I have the receipts.

[conuly]

Some of us had to say so from the start. But some of us misremember. Not you and me.

[nodrog]

“Ah’m gonna finish whut m’ Daddy started.  We’re goin’ in.  Find reasons.”

Poor Gen. C. Powell.  He found out what the underside of a bus looks like…

What we burned up in that stupidity would have put a McMurdo-sized American base on Mars.  For which would you rather be remembered?

[conuly]

SERIOUSLY. LAND WAR IN ASIA. GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES. THESE ARE NOT JUST CASUAL SLOGANS.

[zesty_pinto]

New Coke definitely had the same problems that people associated with other misinformation campaigns, like when DC decided to kill Robin.

I'm not too surprised, sadly. Nostalgia is crazy and lots of folks are addicted to it. Even I admit to enjoying it recreationally when I shouldn't.

[silveradept]

Our memories are extremely pliable, and we are quite good at remembering things that never were...and also building panics about it.

[conuly]

Indeed.

[cellio]

Memories of feelings are quite pliable. That said, I remember hating New Coke when I encountered it (and I wasn't following media reports about it). More specifically, I remember buying ten cases of Original Coke (in glass bottles) before it disappeared. I kept them in a cool, dark part of my basement. Some people have wine cellars; I had a Coke cellar.

After it played out, I've always assumed that Coke Classic was the real goal from the beginning -- that they wanted to make a small change and used a large designed-to-be-temporary change as a distraction -- and that they could shore up customer loyalty by "giving in" in so doing.