I recently overheard an upset individual complain to her friend about how sad our sexist society is that Coca-Cola needed to create a brand new version of diet Coke just so males would feel comfortable purchasing it. Of course, she was referring to the real diet Coke, Coke Zero; but her explanation of its origin is completely false.
Coke started off shortly after the civil war as a self-created concoction to help a wounded soldier curb his morphine addiction. Originally marketed as a an all-curing medicine, it eventually grew over the next 150 years to being the most valuable brand in the world.
Coke has had some minor changes in its formula over the years while having a different recipe for many of the different countries that its in. The urban legend is that Mexican Coke is the best because it contains real sugar cane. Because Coke doesn’t adhere to Jewish Ashkenazi halachic passover rules, Coke has a special Coke just for passover which is really a rebottled version of Mexican Coke; every April, there is a commotion of Canadians and Americans having their rare opportunity to buy real Coke with sugar cane.
Diet drinks started to gain popularity shortly after world war 2; likely due to society moving in a more body-image conscious direction. Coca-Cola company owned a separate soft drink named Tab as their diet Soda, but had no desire to create their own diet Coke until seeing Pepsi produce theirs and runaway with the market.
Pepsi dominated the diet cola market for twenty years until Coke finally had enough and decided to produce their own in 1982. Unfortunately, the technology was not available at the time to simply make a diet version of Coke. Coke laboured for years trying to perfect a formula for a sugar-free version of Coke, but everything they tried didn’t taste quite right.
Consequently, Coke produced a new soft drink named Diet Coke that was not actually “diet Coke” but a completely separate cola based drink without sugar. Because of their failure to create a sugar free Coke, Coca-Cola decided to sell the best tasting sugar-free cola they could come up with.
This drink became such a hit that Coke decided to start selling it in a non-diet version. In 1985, Coke released their latest drink, New Coke – a sugared version of Diet Coke. Despite beating normal Coke and Pepsi in taste tastes, the reception to New Coke was very poor. People were not willing to adapt to change. It was eventually was rebranded as Coke II until it was finally rushed off the market a few years later.
Fast forward 20 years after the creation of Diet Coke and the science had finally advanced enough to create a diet version of Coke. This is Coke Zero.
Coke Zero is not the male version of Diet Coke, but the real diet Coke.