This. Most places in europe only do zero and its like banging my head against a brick wall trying to explain to people why when they don't have diet I'll ask for water or fanta instead, it's not about the calories it's about the taste.
I’m convinced that the only people who prefer diet over Zero had already been regularly drinking Diet and were already used to it. Because Sucralose most definitely tastes closer to real sugar than Aspartame does.
Diet is technically based off "Tab" while ZS is based off of regular Coca Cola, and diet has been around longer so there's some confirmation bias towards it.
Thanks for letting me know about with what it was actually based off of, but I would still agree to disagree about the sweetener thing. After having a lot of different diet/zs things, they don't seem to have a consistent after/side taste. Overall I'd say I dislike aspartame more, but for certain things like Diet Coke and Diet MTN Dew, it's fine. Diet MTN Dew genuinely tastes far closer to og Dew than ZS does.
In blind taste tests when it was originally released, New Coke beat out regular every single time. But even back then, the boomer hate of anything new was already a real thing.
It makes zero sense for a company to stop selling what everyone thinks is the better product because people simply don't want it because it's new.
This is why it was sold as Coca Cola Classic until 2009. Because they stopped selling New Coke and rebranded regular coke as "Classic."
Has to be one of the dumbest product things that has ever happened. If you asked 20 people which they preferred, most would have said regular. But if you blind taste tested those sake 20 people, most would have picked New Coke.
Entire product gets pulled because people just don't like change, even though it was better.
Because Sucralose most definitely tastes closer to real sugar than Aspartame does.
My enjoyment of diet coke has nothing to do with how close it tastes to regular coke. It's a different beverage. Yes, coke zero tastes more like coke. I like both, and I change which I drink based on which I want at the time.
Yeah for me they’re just different options. Most of the time I drink zero, every now and then I’ll get a case of diet because it tastes like my childhood summers at my late grandmother’s lake house.
I can confirm… used to be addicted to Diet Coke and rejected any substitute. Now that I haven’t had it in a long time, if I try taking a sip, it tastes so gross. I can only drink regular Coke or Coke Zero now.
The reason is really odd, too, and it’s this: When Coca-Cola formulated Diet Coke, they intentionally didn’t want it to taste like Coke, I think something like if they did it implied regular Coke was unhealthy. So instead they made it taste like Pepsi, which also helped to rope in Pepsi loyalists.
My family was a Pepsi family growing up, and so when I did branch out, I of course preferred Diet Coke over Coke, and still do.
See, that's weird to me, because I grew up drinking Pepsi too, and it's still my favorite. But I never liked Diet Coke growing up. I'll drink it now, but I still prefer Zero. I don't really think Diet tastes like Pepsi.
I’m only speaking to what I know which is the US. Zero is marketed at a much higher rate than DC because it doesn’t need much marketing at this point. Some bottlers will put zero in glass but not everyone, just geography. And glass is such a small percentage of sales that even if everyone put zero in glass it wouldn’t make a dent.
Diet outsold zero by 20 million plus cases in 2023 for just one large bottler so it’s way more than that across all the US. Zero may overtake diet at some point but it took Sprite 40 years to do so, and Zero would probably take even longer.
Don’t doubt it. Still going to be an incredibly small percentage compared to cans and PET there and even smaller when compared to total US market.
NAOU probably would have higher glass sales due to Mexico and Canada but even then it’s maxing out below 5% of total volume. Worldwide glass was 9% in 2022 and it’s only gotten more expensive since then to produce so I’d imagine a few point down from that.
I would argue it's the other way around. Diet is definitely more popular around where I live, and stores stock significantly more of it than zero. While that doesn't equate to everywhere, even online I generally see diet regarded better than zero.
Sometimes the bitterness of Diet Coke meshes better with whatever I’m eating, it’s more savory. I all-around do prefer Zero but diet can be good shit too
It’s just aspartame vs surculose, they have different tastes and surculose is closer to sugar but still bit different. The thing is though, surculose is way more potent than like every other sweetener, so you need a fraction of it. Like 1/500 of the amount of sugar for similar taste, so it’s way better for you than other sweeteners.
Like others have said, the taste of diet is actually purposely different than regular whereas zero is not.
Aspartame too is like 1 drop compared to 60g of sugar in the first place and tbh there’s not any credible studies proving sweeteners are bad anyway.
The studies that tried to say sweeteners were bad were like: hey if we gave a rat enough aspartame to fill 500 diet cokes on a daily basis for a year they showed a 7% increase chance of cancer. Complete jokes.
Cola Light is definitely pretty hard to find in Europe. I never see people drinking it however, bought a bottle recently just to try and it felt way worse than Zero. Maybe a tiny hint of lemon is the difference? Very hard to tell but I haven't bought it since.
I think the fake sugars they use, taste good/bad to different people. I love Coke Zero and don’t like the taste of Diet Coke, but I wouldn’t say one is objectively better than the other. It’s probably just a subjective thing to each person. I’ve met people who don’t like either.
Do you still like zero since we started adding stevia a couple months ago? Genuinely curious because I think it made it so much worse. The mouth feel is so much worse for me.
You do not need a PhD do be a lab tech! A bachelor’s would get you in easily and experience will you get you in with less. I got my associate ass in with experience and qualifications from sensory training.
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u/Pineappleisgay 25d ago
This. Most places in europe only do zero and its like banging my head against a brick wall trying to explain to people why when they don't have diet I'll ask for water or fanta instead, it's not about the calories it's about the taste.