Tab-delete: Coca-Cola’s first diet soda has been retired after more than 50 years

Tab-delete: Coca-Cola’s first diet soda has been retired

Lesson summary

Hi there, welcome to Plain English, lesson number 334. I’m Jeff; JR is the producer; and the full lesson can be found at PlainEnglish.com/334.

Coming up today: You’re probably familiar with Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Diet Dr. Pepper, and other no-calorie soft drinks. Big beverage makers are getting better and better at mimicking the original in a low-calorie version. We take them for granted today, but no-calorie soda was not always an option. On today’s lesson, we’re going to talk about Tab, the first diet soda introduced by Coca-Cola. It was discontinued after 57 years on the market.

This lesson has been adapted from an article on the web site, The Conversation by Jeffrey Miller, Associate Professor of Hospitality Management at the University of Colorado.

In the second half of the lesson, we’ll talk about the English expression turn to and we have a quote of the week. Let’s get going!

Tab, Coke’s first foray into diet sodas, is retired

The Coca-Cola company’s original diet soda brand, Tab, is headed to the soda graveyard.

Coca-Cola has announced that it is discontinuing Tab after 57 years on the market, and fans of the drink scrambled to purchase their last can of nostalgia before sales stopped at the end of December.

Tab was not the first diet soda: that honor belongs to a beverage called (creatively) No-Cal, which was developed by beverage industry pioneer Hyman Kirsch in 1952. Kirsch wanted to create a soda for diabetics and people with cardiovascular problems, so he used a chemical called cyclamate. Cylcamate was discovered in 1937 by a graduate student after he licked it and found that it tasted sweet—about 30 times sweeter than sugar, in fact. What’s more, cyclamate isn’t metabolized, making it ideal for people who need to avoid sugar for medical reasons.

But guess what? From the start, No-Cal was popular with a different type of consumer: dieters.

Diet soda really took off with the introduction of Diet-Rite Cola by the Royal Crown Cola company in 1958. By 1960, Diet-Rite was the fourth-best-selling soft drink in the country, trailing only Coca-Cola, Pepsi and 7 Up.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi, finding themselves behind the eight ball, scrambled to come up with their own diet soda offerings.

Coca-Cola’s first foray into the diet cola market was an ambitious one. The company called the secret initiative “Project Alpha.” The objective of Project Alpha was to develop a soda that tasted good, had a proper mouthfeel, and was attractive to women, the presumptive market. It also needed a catchy name.

For the name, Coke executives had one directive: it couldn’t be called Diet Coke. Early diet sodas didn’t taste great, so companies didn’t want their main brand names associated with the funky taste of diet soda. So “Diet Coke” was out—for now.

Where did Coca-Cola turn to come up with a brilliant name that would appeal to masses of people? They turned to a computer: an early IBM mainframe computer generated more than 600 potential names. The criteria were the following: three or four letters and not offensive in any language.

Tabb, T-A-B-B, which was eventually shortened to Tab, T-A-B, eventually won the battle of market testing. It was introduced to the world in a series of ads with the tagline “How can just one calorie taste so good?”

Tab got off to a slow start. By the end of its first year, it had only 10% of the diet soda market; it found itself competing with other Coca-Cola diet sodas, including one with a grapefruit flavor.

It ran into other troubles. All diet sodas relied on artificial sweeteners. That’s what gave them a sweet taste with no calories. But danger was lurking: the sweeteners used in these early formulas were found to have caused cancer.

In 1969, America’s Food and Drug Administration banned cyclamate, a key ingredient in Tab. Coca-Cola was forced to reformulate the Tab recipe using saccharine instead. Then in a second blow, the FDA required warning labels on foods with saccharine.

Despite these obstacles, Tab still ended up becoming the bestselling diet cola of the 1970s and 1980s. People, it seems, were willing to turn a blind eye to potential health problems as long as they could continue to get their calorie-free diet soda. And Tab, for a brief period, was the favorite of the bunch.

It was only in 1982 that Coca-Cola introduced “Diet Coke,” the soda you can still buy in a silver can today.

Contrary to the company’s original fears, Diet Coke was an immediate hit. Even though the flavor of the new beverage was not a carbon copy of the sugar-sweetened version, customers took to it. When people started buying Diet Coke, they didn’t switch away from regular Coke. They switched away from Tab. Over the years, Tab’s market share dwindled; by 2019, its sales made up only about 1% of the Coca-Cola portfolio.

Yet the drink managed to retain some passionate devotees, even (or especially) as rumors of its impending doom circulated on and off over the years. A Tab shortage in 2018 caused self-described Tab-aholics to stockpile their favorite beverage, and petitions to save the drink were circulated and sent to the company.

They couldn’t stop the inevitable. Coca-Cola is trying to streamline its portfolio and cut underperforming brands: the company plans to eliminate half of its 500 brands in the coming years. For Tab lovers, time has run out. Coca-Cola has retired its first big diet soda brand. The only cans that remain are in the basements of Tab-aholics.

Have you ever been the victim of a discontinued product?

Couple questions come to mind. Cylcamate, that original cancer-causing chemical that was 50 times sweeter than sugar. A graduate student discovered it was so sweet in a lab when he licked it. Is that the recommended procedure? I don’t think I’d go around the lab licking chemicals.

Second question: have they ever stopped making a product that you really like? When a company stops making a product, we say that product is discontinued, or has been discontinued. So tell me in our Facebook group for listeners if a company has ever discontinued a product you really love.

I’m not a big diet soda fan, but I do like the new versions that taste like the original. As a kid, we drank Coca-Cola in our house—by “we,” I mean, me. I don’t think my parents drank it. But they bought it for me; today, I don’t drink it as much because of the calories. But Coke Zero Sugar is good—it’s not exactly, precisely the original Coke, but to me, it’s really close. To me, it doesn’t have that funky chemical taste of Diet Coke.