Pepsi Goes Old-School, Will Coke Follow?
A good friend that knows my peculiarities sent me the good news. Pepsi will be selling versions of Pepsi and Mnt Dew with actual sugar. This usually only happens in saner countries, around Passover (if you are on the East Coast) or in the early 1980s. One can only hope that Coke will follow suit, especially if they issue Cherry Coke and Vanilla coke with cane sugar. Of course you can already buy Mexican Coke at Costco, and you can order Dublin Dr Pepper online, but if this starts a trend the world will be that much better.
Posted on February 18, 2009, in Pop Culture. Bookmark the permalink. 15 Comments.
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Wow, that is good news. No more HFCS!
Cherry coke. With real sugar. I would cry with happiness…
but will they start using glass bottles again???? that would be heaven.
mike d,
I think that is very unlikely. The transportation costs of glass bottles are huge. The big boys in the soda world do not care about quality. They care about quantity. That is why we have plastic bottles and HFCS. Notice that in their ads though everyone is drinking from a glass bottle that is dripping with condensation. They are using nostalgia to market their product while refusing to sell you what you drank 30 years ago!
The only hope that I have is the success of Mexican Coke will create demand for quality, but the Coca-Cola Company has given no indication that they understand that they are selling an inferior product.
I’ll add that as a non-drinker I envy wine drinkers and the fact that the companies that cater to them care about quality and realize that packaging can affect that.
I’m a diet Coke kind of guy, but this was to be expected once Costco started importing Coke with real sucrose from Mexico and selling tons of it in the US.
I don’t drink soda, so I don’t care.
Ivan,
I’ll come off as a nut now, but if half of the bad things that people say about HFCS are true, then you should care, because it is the Devil, and will be the downfall of the USA and any other country that falls under its spell.
I don’t think it’s so much refusal to sell what you drank 30 years ago as it is allowing you to settle. I think there are typically some kind of commemorative bottles of coke in real glass at any given time in my supermarket, but I’m not willing to pay the premium.
I hope this catches on. I think we can all agree it’s worth a couple cents extra to use real sugar.
I wonder if this was originally tried due to the high price of corn, and whether it will go away now that the market for ethanol has shifted and corn prices have dropped.
I love me some real sugar beverages. Mexican Coke and Dublin Dr. Pepper are both pretty great, though I don’t drink either on a regular basis.
Oh, I believe all the bad things about HFCS, but you aren’t going to persuade me that cane sugar is healthy. It’s not near as bad as HFCS, but it’s still crap.
I’ll come off as a nut now: If all the sodas and junk food using HFCS changed to cane sugar, obesity would still be a problem. The problem is that we really shouldn’t be eating excess sugar anyway.
I find that as I eat a healthier diet and stay away from products with added sugar (of whatever kind), I lose my appetite for those products (I used to love soda in high school – the last time I tried to drink one, it nearly made me sick). I enjoy other foods a lot more, and while I occasionally (very occasionally) indulge in some 80%+ cacoa chocolate bars or some other indulgence, I find I don’t miss sodas or candy bars all that much.
But I don’t want to turn this into a debate about our crappy American diets. Suffice to say, I don’t care because HFCS/cane sugar/agave nectar/crystalline fructose – it’s all the same to me: to be avoided.
It’s also because a lot of health food people have portrayed fructose as the devil. So there is starting to be a corn sugar backlash. (My wife makes me check the label for our foods although I’m pretty dubious that there is a huge health effect)
Ivan,
I agree that we should not eat/drink sugar. But given that I do, I might as well drink the good stuff.
Clark,
Check out the wikipedia page for HFCS. Regardless of the health effect, there is certainly an effect on taste. Would you put HFCS in your chocolate? Why or why not?
Oh, I fully agree it has a taste effect. However I’d never make pecan pie with sugar rather than corn syrup. So the fact it has a unique taste doesn’t mean that taste is bad for cooking. And no, I wouldn’t put it in chocolate because of the taste I am after. I would put it in some deserts that use my chocolate though.
That’s more my point. It is what it is.
For the kind of taste I like in pop I only buy pop with aspartame. I don’t like the taste of sugar (sucrose or fructose) in pop.
HFCS or high fructose corn syrup is not the same as store shelf Karo corn syrup. The stuff they use in soda is so processed and concentrated you’d never guess it was corn syrup once.