New Coke: the cola that won Coca-Cola's biggest taste test and lost America
The Pepsi Challenge: how a blind taste test scared Coca-Cola
For decades, Coca-Cola was the cola everybody knew. Then its rival put two paper cups on a table in the supermarket, hid the names and asked shoppers to taste. What happens to a famous drink when nobody can see its name?
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1
Imagine Miva in an American supermarket in the late 1970s. A man from Pepsi stands at a small table with two paper cups. One holds Pepsi and one holds Coca-Cola, and the cans are hidden under a cloth. "Taste both," he says, "and tell me which one you like."
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2
Miva picks the sweeter one. Then the man lifts the cloth: it was Pepsi. This is the Pepsi Challenge, and Pepsi puts people like Miva in its TV ads. The test has a name: a blind taste test, because you taste with the names hidden.
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3
The ads work. In 1977, Pepsi starts to sell more than Coca-Cola in supermarkets, where shoppers choose for themselves. Coca-Cola stays the bigger cola only thanks to vending machines and the counters of restaurants.
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4
Year after year since about 1970, Coca-Cola's lead over Pepsi gets smaller. The part of all cola sold that goes to one brand is called its market share, and Pepsi's part is catching up.
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Around 1980, two men get the top jobs at Coca-Cola in Atlanta. Roberto Goizueta was born in Cuba and trained as a chemical engineer, and he becomes the boss. Donald Keough becomes the president and works next to him. They want to stop the slide.
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They look at who buys Pepsi. Many are young, and they seem to like its sweeter taste more than the sharper taste of Coke. In a blind taste test, the famous name cannot help Coca-Cola. Only the taste counts.
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7
So the bosses come to an idea, and it is a dangerous one. Maybe the problem is not the ads or the price. Maybe it is the drink itself: a secret recipe almost 100 years old.
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Go further
Three more things about the cola war.