May 21, 2026 • 36 mins
Heads-up! We are extremely biased on this one. Back in the 1980s, Coca-Cola was terrified of losing the Great Soda War to Pepsi. In the depths of desperation, they futzed with the golden goose — the secret formula for one of the most popular sodas on the planet. In the first spicy sip of this two-liter series, Ben, Noel, and Max discover a grand conspiracy to boost sales… and a genuine culture war looming on the horizon.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. Let's hear it for the man,
the myth, the legend, our super producer, mister Max Williams,
Who Max, Crystal Pepsi Williams and Crystal Gravy Williams. That's
a snail shout out. That's mister Noel Brown. I am Ben,
(00:52):
I'm Ben Bullet.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yes, that's right, that is who you are. And I
just have a question, man, is that a performative thing
to people? Just are got they compelled to do it
by habit? What is it indicating even refreshment satisfaction.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
I think it's nostalgia. I think it's also something people
have been brainwashed into doing. But folks, if you like us,
have spent a lot of time in the Southeast, you
recognize that pop and that maybe there's some science to it,
maybe aspirating like that makes the water a little spicier.
(01:28):
A yeah, this is our story about something just patently ridiculous.
And guys, are we soda fans? I don't think either
of you guys are really.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
On the pop. I am a DDP man. Okay, it
means diet doctor Pepper. Oh, okay, I think it is
the superior diet soda. I used to be a DC man,
but now I'm exclusively a DDP man. And other than that,
only a fizzy water. And lately I've been making pomegranate
fizzy water spritzers, which is kind of like a soda
that you make at home. Hmmm. Nice. What about you, Max? Uh?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Personally A, I love that you drop the pop reference
right there. Of course, as a native Midwesterner, the word
pop is just burned into my memory. But it has
been many years since I've had a soda pop. Whoa, Yeah,
well a Coca Cola and most soda pops are not
conditioned there. But also I before that it would be
(02:28):
it was a very rare occasion. I just I know,
I like soda when I was younger, but I don't know.
I around my mid twenties, I just stopped drinking it.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Well, it is bonkers to me that some people just
drink it as they're like only of fluid. Yeah, it's
the source of hydration.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah, this is a special occasion for me, guys.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I'm a whole street Coca cola zero.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Uh, I don't know if I could take the unletted
here in my ancient years.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
You know, when I'll have the unletted occasionally been and
only then is on an airplane, will I will get
a full flavored coke because they don't give you the
whole can and it's with ice. So it's just sort
of like, oh, what was that like? Let me remind
myself what that tastes like?
Speaker 1 (03:11):
And it is the taste of a generation, and it
will taste different on a plane due to the high altitude. Yeah,
maybe we know that soda is not for everyone, and
we are not going to pretend it's the most healthy
thing you can drink. But hot dog, folks, is it tasty?
You can find all sorts of spins on the basic ingredients, right, sugar,
(03:35):
flavored syrup, carbonated water, a little bit of acid.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Some sodas like it makes it really kick, really kicks.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Some sodas like Coca cola, pepsi, you know, you know
them all the world round, and then others are more
regionally famous, like have you guys ever tried a cheer
wine or.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Doctor enough, Doctor enough? It's just enough. Ben, I think
I mentioned to you the other day that I've been
really enjoying rewatching and watching some of it for the
first time. A sketch comedy show called The Birthday Boys,
and they did a fantastic sketch where there's that old
trope of like, you know, the two guys that know
(04:16):
the secret recipe to coca cola never allowed to like
fly on the same plane together or even like you know,
I guess the lore the exaggerated version goes be in
the same room together. Well, in this Birthday Boys sketch,
they're best friends and they're one of them is like
on an interview show and he's asking him about so
what's the deal with the whole like you and the
other guys. Oh, he's right over there. We drove here together.
(04:38):
We're gonna go to a movie later, you want to come,
And then the guys that know the pepsi recipe are
also there. And then later on the two guys that
know the tab recipe saunter in and nobody cares about
what happens to them.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Oh my gosh. The only person I knew who an
ironically drank tab was our old mentor and original boss,
Roxanne Reed. She actually liked it. I thought it was
a bit for years.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
I don't understand what tab is. I think it's basically
just like generic diet cola that doesn't taste like anything
in particular. But I can't really speak to it, Ben,
because I've never I've never had the pleasure.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
It's I've had the unfortunate experience. It answers the question
I guess some customers have where they're drinking a different
soda and they say, what if this tasted terrible?
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Right? What if it was this but bad?
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Kind of like Dr pepper twenty three secret ingredients and
they're all poop.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Now, Ben, you know, I'm a Doctor pepper Man, although
I'm really more of a of a DDP man, but
I will occasionally have a full flavor one of those
as a treat as well. But Ben, you know who
did take something that everybody loved and thought what if
it was this but bad? Well? It was the Coca
Cola company, That's right. Yes, episode's all about that is
(05:54):
and I think that's what they were doing. They thought
they were being real crafty and smart, and they were
telling them the public a new idea that this is gonna,
you know, take take coke into the future. And of course,
as we sit and record this, and as we sit
in most days of our lives, we find ourselves in
the fair metropolis that is Atlanta, Georgia, home of the
(06:15):
Atlanta Braves, chicken wings, and coc colon.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
And you've probably heard countless stories from the Great Soda Wars,
like how companies work to keep their recipe secret, or
how this is a true story, folks, PEPSI was briefly
a naval force, But today we're looking at something different.
This spicy little sip or ridiculous history is coming to
us from none other than, as you said, NOL, Atlanta's
(06:47):
own Coca Cola. We can all agree Coke is a
massive success story, but we can also agree they did
not get everything right. So grab your favorite ashy snack
of choice. What goes better with a soda? We leave
it to you. This may be a two parter, or
(07:07):
dare we say a two leader. Perhaps the best example
of a swing and a miss by our friends at
Coke is something called New Coke. New Coke, and stay
tuned for some conspiracies at the end.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Nol, we've talked about this fella recently. Ben, When does
this come up in recent episodees talking about John as Pemberton,
the pharmacist.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
With oh gosh, yeah, we have talked about him in
the past. I think it's.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Recently and I can't remember what it was.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
It's weird because we have, you know, we have a
bit of a bubble of information, folks, Max Noll and yours. Truly,
We're going to keep the origin story short, partially because
it could be it's an old episode, partially because, as
you pointed out, Nol, we probably end up talking about
this pretty often, but mainly because, folks, everybody who grew
(08:01):
up in Georgia already knows the origin story of Coca cola,
chapter and verse. Yeah, take us to Pemberton.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Man, Well, I did kind of forget that. Johnny p
not to be confused with Johnny Pemberton, who's a delightful
comedian and actor, was actually a colonel in the Civil
War for the Batties.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
A Confederate colonel, he had sustained some pretty gnarly injuries,
and this led to him picking up an equally gnarly
morphine addiction.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Oh yeah, a monkey on his back. After the war,
he desperately searched for something to kick the habit. With yeah,
and it was the right thing to do.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
This is the mid eighteen eighties. He is based in
Columbus at the time, and he originally comes up with
something he calls Pemberton's French Wine coca.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Okay, yeah, so cocaine juice, yes, with alcohol and caffeine.
Let's replace my morphine addiction with alcoholism and cocaine addiction.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Right, Yeah, And the issue was Pemberton's French Wine coca.
It's sold, okay, I know, but also French wine feels
it's weird to say both of those.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
It's a little redundant a bit.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And this this concoction wasn't quite scratching the itch for him,
if you get what we're saying.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
So now he's French invented wine. It just seems like
putting a hat on a hat.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
It does, Yeah, because when Americans think of wine, they
already think of France, you know what I mean. Nobody's
like wine, oh, Spanish, even though there are lots of
Spanish wines.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Absolutely, and some people might think of Italy, but I
certainly think of France.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, right, I'm right there with you, man. So it's
eighteen eighty six Atlanta and the larger Fulton County passed
prohibition laws because they hated fun and so in response,
our buddy Johnny makes a non alcoholic version of Pemberton's
French Wine. He does up the cocaine quotient, right, He
(10:07):
calls it well, his bookkeeper tells him to call it
coca cola. That's the basic story. And yes, as you
can tell, folks, we are familiar with the rumors. They
are true. Up until about nineteen oh three, the original
Coca Cola, Coca Cola Classic as it would later be called,
(10:28):
did contain cocaine. Like we say, it was a different time.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
And actually again this must have come up on her stuff.
They don't want you to know. But to this day,
the cocaine that would be a byproduct of the coca
that's used to make Coca cola like goes somewhere. It
does exist, and they generate a ton of the stuff
every single year.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
To jump in here, a great minds thingle light like
also nol in my mind thinks like as well as
I was about to jump in here and ask that
exact same question, because I was talking to a doctor
friend of mine and I'm not to get the nose
procedure done. She's like, Oh, yeah, they're gonn numbing up.
I'm like, probably with a bunch of a cocaine from
Coca cola.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
That's what it is. It goes to the dental Yes,
it goes to malancrot pharmaceuticals. The cocaine byproduct extracted from
coca leaves used to flavor coca cola is sold to
a pharmaceutical company and often used in various topical forms.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Because of the numbing effect, I believe. So there is
so much more to the history of Coca cola. That's
a That's a drink for another day. For now, let's
fast forward skirt skirt across Coke's expansion throughout the US
and then later across the planet. At the close of
World War Two, Coca Cola controls something like sixty percent
(11:47):
of the entire market share for cola. This is a
catbird seat. But we all know the problem with being
the king of the hill. Kings have a tendency to fall.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
That's true, and if you take a shot at the king,
you're best not messed. That doesn't really apply here, but
it's an expression that I enjoy.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Yes, ed, we know that Coke already by this point
has an arch rival, Pepsi.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Pepsi is hot on Coca Cola's heels. For a time
it looked as though Pepsi might win the soda wars.
It's if you look at nineteen eighty three, you see
the Coke's market share, which again used to be sixty percent,
has decreased by more than half, all the way down
to under twenty four percent. And the issue here is
(12:34):
that Pepsi is out selling Coke in grocery stores and markets.
Coke is barely hanging on because they have all these
legacy deals with big institutions. They have armies of vending machines,
they have an exclusivity agreement with the fast food giant McDonald's,
(12:55):
so that's where they're making their money.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
For sure, and that's obviously still very much a thing today.
I am always bummed out when I go to a
place and realize they only sell Pepsi products, because I
just think pepsi is gross. I do not like the
way it tastes, and again not a soda drinker, but
I just think it's not a local bias. Coke just
unequivocally tastes better than pepsi. So Coke did respond to this,
(13:18):
you know, potential catastrophe of you know, pepsi just eating
up all their market share in multiple ways. Their marketing
folks believe that these aging baby boomers would become increasingly
likely to drink diet sodas or you know, maybe like
switched to water as they became more health and weight
(13:39):
conscious over time. So any growth and what they in
the industry refers to as full calorie sodas would have
to come from younger customers, you know, buying things like
Surge and Josta. H. Yeah, remember those, they said those
in schools.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
M h.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
I'm a fan of Jolt as well, and the Serge
people gave me and my cohort a bunch of Surge
themed CDs.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Back in the day.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
I think I still have one. But anyhow, what what
we know is that they were they were onto something,
because these young customers are always going to be the
golden goose for marketing, and it seems these kids who
maybe liked the higher sugar sweetness content they dug pepsi.
(14:27):
And there's also a cultural thing that occurs because coke
is seen by part of this younger demographic as a
member of the stodgy status quo and Pepsi, in contrast,
is a little more exciting, a little bit more edgy.
So the folks at Coca Cola started asking themselves, how
do we make coke cool?
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Again?
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Very important question, but the co came back right right,
and someone said, uh, Jeremy, you're.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Crazy, Sorry about that. We're gonna need to do this
my way.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
At the same time, you know, this question becomes a
time sensitive question. It's no longer abstract because they can
see that across the board customers are purchasing less cola.
In general, the market is as you mentioned there, nol,
it's shifting to diet drinks and non soda soft drinks,
(15:24):
and Coke does manufacture and sell quite a lot of
those alternative beverages. But they still felt the writing was
on the wall. Harumph, hrrumph. Something had to be done.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Well, and they weren't going to just let their flagship
legacy cash cow brand recognition beverage slip away. Oh yeah,
absolutely not, because it's still a Leviathan, right, And it's
not just a twelve ounce can or a bottle or
a six and a half ounce bottle. At this point,
(16:04):
it is a. It is a piece of identity, a
nostalgia for a lot of people. So into the scene
strolls one of those move fast and break things kind
of guys, a new CEO with the name of Roberto Goizueta, Gitsueta,
who truly takes on this attitude that nothing is sacred,
(16:30):
not even the holiest of holy, the you know, original
recipe Coca cola. This happens in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Yeah, and he says, look this, he first gets the
position in nineteen eighty, right, and he is, like you said,
he's kind of a cowboy, right, and he's a coke
man for sure. He had previously worked in the Bahamas
for the Coke subsidiary there, which will come into play.
They decided to create their own version of skunk Works.
(17:01):
Skunk Works is famously here in the US. It is
the secret arm of Lockheed Martin that works on you know,
the spy planes.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
And the real spooky stuff. Yeah, I'm sort of a
military Willy Wonka kind of situation exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
That's a great way to put it. So Coke is
making their own kind of skunk Works, and the ZX,
which is I think a pretty cool term for executives
what do we think? Okay, the X All right, So
the ZX go to their marketing VP at the time,
a guy named Sergio Zimon, and their USA Coca Cola president,
(17:37):
a guy named Brian Dyson, and they say, all right,
we're gonna have a top secret operation. We are going
to mess with the original formula and no one can know.
So we have to call it a code name, and
we're going to call it Project Kansas.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah, not to be confused with the Florida Project. There's
no reason you would confuse it. I just think it's
funny when these big covert things are named in such
dull and uninteresting ways.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
And what was the Florida Project? Again?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Was that Disney Disney? Yeah, it was the way it
was like, it was the code name used so that
no one would know that the Walt Disney Corporation was
secretly buying up all this land on the cheap.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
In the Reedy Creek district.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
We have an episode about that too on stuff They'll
let you know.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Also the name of excellent film about folks living in
some of the low rent, kind of disney fied motels
on the outskirts of Disneyland there in Florida in Orlando.
The filmmaker that did that went on to win an
Oscar for Anora. It's one of his early early ones.
And I think it's phenomenal awesome.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Yeah, and Project Kansas you might be seeing. Hey, guys,
you made such a big deal about Coca Cola being
a cultural institution in Atlanta. Why is this called Project Kansas? Well, folks,
it is named after an internally famous photo of a
journalist named William Allen White. In the photo, he is
(19:05):
just looking housing a Coca Cola. We're kidding. He's sipping
it through a straw like a little punk.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
But he does look like a dainty fellow with his
with his bowler hat on, standing at the soda fountain,
just sipping away, clutching the glass, the tiny glass, and
he's clutching the glass and the straw and just seems
like he's having a good old time. Oh I like
this pever sure.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Carbonated stuff through a straw. Anyway, It's unusual, man, it's unusual.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Well yeah, if it's got ice, yeah, that changes.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
He's also a small cup like cup I'm looking at nice.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
I think that was back when they mixed it on
the and yeah, on the fly, and yeah, the soda
jerks and I think they did use sort of smaller
cups back in those.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
And there's a guy in the background who's just drinking
it without a straw straight.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah, like a couple of it looked like a bunch
of gangsters, so like they're about to do a heist. Actually,
everyone accept our man in the front. He just looks
like an old man that wandered onto the scene. And
then these g men are in the back and joining
their sodas a little more, you know, covertly.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
And this photo please do look it up if you
if you get a second again. That journalist is named
William Allen White. Kansas journalists Koch loved this photograph. They
had used it in all sorts of marketing campaigns, and
if you walked around the zech's offices, you would see
that several of them had prints of this photo, large
(20:34):
prints that they would hang up on their office walls.
So that's why they called it the Kansas Project. Sergio
and Brian are looking back at the data they have
from numerous blind taste tests, surveys and focus groups, and
they emphasized the taste test because most of the taste
(20:56):
tests tell them that when customers go don't know which
pop or soda they're drinking, they tend to prefer pepsi
because it has a sweeter taste.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Boers to me, Man, Bogers, I mean, it's like coke
has a flavor. Pepsi just kind of tastes like overly
saccharine syrup water.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Do you guys think that people drink because I know
a lot of people order it a bar, like a
whiskey and a coke or a jack and coke or something.
Do people do that with pepsi?
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yes, they very much do. Like I have, like you know,
I still have like family back in like Michigan and
stuff like that, and they'll talk about like, oh yeah,
when the bar and got a jack and pepsi. I'm like,
oh what, And it actually sounds like foreign to you.
It's like what is this? What is this cocktaiin I've
never heard.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Of it, much like restaurants would. In particular, bars tend
to have a coke or pepsi not.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
Yeah, so, at least in my experience in Atlanta, we
basically get all your soda boxes from a specific distributor,
so you get like all and they usually will have
coke that stripul will either have coke or pepsi or
something other things. So yeah, that's how it's exactly the
same as it would be able to change. So, like
you know, I think was a KFCs pepsi products, but
(22:10):
that's r mc donald's, yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Because they're part of young brands Taco Bell as well.
And while I can't I can't stand pepsi, I do
love a Baja.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Blast, But in Atlanta, you know, it's just such a
coke area that like everything is like it's like I
remember being like we were just talking about one time
just in general, and it was like massively more expensive
and even just do pepsi.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Pepsi's kind of king yes still and in the Midwest
and in the Pacific Northwest, and yeah, you're what you're
saying there.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Max ties into this idea of monopolization of distribution channels,
which is another part of coke's success, to be quite honest,
as well as pepsi's. And this marketing is confusing to
Sergio and Brian because, as we mentioned earlier, they already
had other research that told them that a lot of
(23:03):
people were shifting away from the calorie heavy, super sweet stuff.
So why do these blind taste tests seem to emphasize
really sweet things. It might be because the first sweet
sip is cool, but it doesn't mean you would want
one hundred other SIPs of equal sweetness. Still, the facts
are the facts. So these guys went back and they
(23:25):
fused with the Holy Grail, the secret formula for Coca Cola.
They mainly made it sweeter, logical move, and then they
put that secret still very sweet soda into fresh rounds
of taste tests. So now you would have like three cups.
You would have a little cup of unidentified pepsi, a
(23:46):
little cup of secret Coca Cola, and a little cup
of what they were not yet calling new coke. And
this gets really interesting because they do some of these
taste tests in the Southeast United States, the historic cultural
stronghold of Coca Cola, and the customers there seem to
(24:07):
prefer the new flavor. And then once somebody unveils the
results and says, hey, this is also a Coca Cola product,
the brand loyalty kicks in. Guys, the brainwashing kicks in,
and they say.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Oh, this is coke.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Well, I love coke, so I love this too.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
For sure, And so they're hoping anyway. I mean, you know,
because it is there's a certain amount of nostalgia at
play in a brand like that that has such historical
roots and all of the imagery and gets credited for
being like responsible for the modern version of Santa Claus
and you know, all of these things that are kind
of wrapped up in American culture, and this guy kind
(24:48):
of overplaces hand a bit and thinking that that stuff's
going to be the stuff that's going to earn them
some good will. But in fact, what he's done here
is kind of took a big old poop on all
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, so there's a true story. In the taste test,
this stuff was so popular that one of their bottling
companies liked it so much they threatened to sue Coca
Cola if the company didn't actually roll out the product.
And to explain this really quickly, because Coca Cola is
(25:29):
such a big company, a lot of us regular consumers
Johnny Blue Jeans on the street, we're not aware that
the bottling companies are going to be third parties. Pretty
often they have a contract with Coca Cola proper, but
they're their own thing and they just happened to have
a deal that allows them to make coke products.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yeah, and as we also know or maybe you don't,
when it comes to these types of companies, you got
to like make these orders way in advance in order
to make uh deadlines for product rolls rollouts, and it's
it's it's a it's a whole thing where you sometimes
have to schedule these productions like year a year in
demand sometimes. So it would absolutely be a problem if
(26:13):
all of a sudden they didn't have that business because
they've literally, you know, rejected other business in favor of
being ready to go with this new product rollout for coke.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
And it's an interesting corporate position too, write interesting business
arrangement because you are you are your own company. You
are not Coca Cola. But if someone asks you what
you make, you make one hundred percent Coca Cola products.
It's got to like being a contract worker in a way.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
So this is all great news for Sergio and Brian.
It is the type of stuff that sounds awesome in
a boardroom, but the marketing is not as solid as
it may have looked at first glance. People in general,
as we know, tend to dislike change, especially if we
feel a nostalgic or emotional relationship with the status quo.
(27:07):
So this this cracked me up. I hope we all
enjoy this too. In one of the taste tests facts
or Takeaways, they found that somewhere around ten to twelve
percent of customers weren't just saying they didn't like this
new flavor. They said they were deeply angry at the
(27:29):
idea that anybody would replace Coca Cola. They felt personally offended.
They would stop drinking the stuff entirely if this crap
was going to be the new flavor. That's a very
visceral reaction to something as you know, mundane as soda pop.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
But still most people said that they you know, the
focus group types would they would accept the change, though
they also said it would take you know a little
time to get used to.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Yeah. And we know that this data is again not
just coming from blind taste test, it's also coming from
surveys and focus groups, and marketing calculus at the time
placed much more importance on the surveys, especially because they
were less negative than the taste test. So now they're
(28:20):
armed with the information that works best for them. Our
pals Sergio and Brian are able to convince the ZX
to change Coke's Holy Grail formula in nineteen eighty five,
and in this conversation they also, by the way, downplayed
the repeated and consistent predictions of focus groups. Pretty much
(28:43):
every focus group they asked told them the general public
is not going to like it if you guys change
the recipe. If you tell them that you're changing something
they associate with, you know, roller skating rinks in summer
camp and fun times as a child, they're going to
hate you. What happens next has been reviewed, discussed, analyzed extensively,
(29:09):
and obsessed over for decades. It remains a standard topic
of study in business and marketing schools even today. So
the first big discussion after green lighting this idea of
what would become called new Coke was whether we make
it a replacement entirely for the old stuff, or whether
(29:30):
we make it a new, separate addition to Coke's roster. Right,
we know stuff like this, It already happened recently. Diet
Coke came out in nineteen eighty two. Side note, diet
Pepsi came out in nineteen sixty four, well late to
the game there, guys. But these bodily associates of Coke
(29:51):
Proper were already really pod that they had to make
diet coke. It threw off their whole production process. And
so a lot of these companies had already sued Coca
Cola over syrup price fixing, which we didn't know was
a thing, and the situation was getting even stickier with
(30:13):
the rollout of Cherry coke. Yeah, they were divided in
the boardroom from the beginning. Some members of management were
concerned that this would be a win for Pepsi if
they had two separate versions.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Of coke, and this, you know, immediately creates a problem
of brand dilution and this idea of you know, just
confusing the public, confusing their customers and cannibalizing their own sales.
But Sergio and Brian did have support from the CEO.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Yeah, the King is on your side. It turns out
that our pal Roberto we mentioned that he had a
background in the Bahamas. He's from Cuba. Originally he said,
hang on, I've tried something like this in the past.
Back in the early days of my career as a cokeman,
I ran the Bahamas subsidiary, and we looked into local preferences.
(31:09):
We tweaked the flavors slightly, and when we did that,
we significantly improved sales in that market. So, you guys,
says Robertel, I'm all about refinement and replacement. It worked
before for me, so why can't it work now on
a larger scale. He argued, the company needs to make
the change not an addition to the product line, but
(31:31):
a full replacement. And he says, we're not doing it
in secret, We're doing it publicly. It is new coke
or no coke. And we're also we're gonna have different
packages and we'll have a little line that says new
exclamation mark on the label. That's where we get the
street name new Coke.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Exactly new coke. Hets the market on April twenty third,
nineteen eighty five, and that same week Coke stops production
oof of the original formula. For a while, new coke
was sold in the same coke packaging. The bottlers still
had left over labels, cartons and cans, and there was
(32:13):
a huge press conference in New York City to announce
this initiative. However, it did not go well. PEPSI was
likely responsible for this. Feeding reporters you know, uncomfortable questions,
guait Sueta pointed out Coke's original formula had been altered
in the past. This was not anything new, he said,
(32:35):
specifically back in nineteen thirty five to get Kosher certification. However,
he wouldn't acknowledge taste tests as their motivation because that
would have implied the first formula wasn't like, you know,
the American classic that everyone knew and loved to begin with. Instead,
he got defensive, which is never a good.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Look with reporters.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, I mean, wow, you know, it seems like it's
part of the course these days, but still a lot
of good look and especially if you're you know, it's
like it's like someone's saying, you're just not getting what
I'm what I'm my vision is here.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
You know, you're a nasty woman. You should smile more.
Uh uh, We're not here to villify Roberto. You guys
know who we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Instead.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Uh So, one of these reporters asked him if diet
Coke would also be reformulated if assuming new Coke is
a success, and our CEO flipped out. He famously replied, no,
and I didn't assume that this is a success. This
(33:39):
is a success.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Oh no, man, just because you say it is, I
doesn't doesn't mean it is.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
I mean, what's a more successful route of ever proving
somebody wrong than just vehemently denying the truth.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Well again, we're seeing quite a lot of that these days,
and it's crazy making. But here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
For time, New Coke was indeed a success story until
it wasn't. And with that we're going to pause. We
can't wait to get to the second leader of this
two liter episode. Please tune in for the the crazy
part of the story in our second part of the
(34:22):
Bizarre Saga of New Coke. Big big thanks or super
producer mister Max Williams, Big thanks to Oh gosh, does
Jonathan Strickland ak the Twister drink Coca Cola?
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Does you know?
Speaker 3 (34:34):
I mean probably an Arcy Cola fan?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
I bet he is.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Wow, everybody's catching strays today.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
No, it's true, ARSI call is not the worst. It's
just it's just like kind of generic. It's just generic,
and everything's generic compared to Coke Classic, especially New Coke.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Okay, now I got a better one. I got better
Jonathan Strickland goes to the world of coke so you
can stand there and only drink Beverly.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Oh, he loves bever Beverly is terrible. Yeah, that's the
correct answer. I almost spat out my coke zero for
anybody who doesn't know. Beverly is best described as a
war crime. That you can drink it is. I think
it's a digestive or yeah, it's a digestive.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
I think taste like for net hmm, okay, so liquid
tube paste. It's just terrible. Yeah, not good. And that
is something that you can I believe still to this day.
Sample at the Coke Museum here in Atlanta, the World
of Coke.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Yes, that's the way they ruin in the field trip
for countless school children. Your faithful correspondents include it. Speaking
to a correspondent's Big Big thanks to doctor Rachel Big
Spinach Lance, as well as the rude Dudes of Ridiculous Crime.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Huge thanks to aj Bahamas, Jacobs, the Puzzler, and Jonathan
Strickland aka the Quizzer, as well as us Jeff Coats
and Christophroscio. Is here in spirit.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
All right, folks, crack open a cold one for us.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Will be back see you next time, folks. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. Let's hear it for the man,
the myth, the legend, our super producer, mister Max Williams,
Who Max, Crystal Pepsi Williams and Crystal Gravy Williams. That's
a snail shout out. That's mister Noel Brown. I am Ben,
(00:52):
I'm Ben Bullet.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yes, that's right, that is who you are. And I
just have a question, man, is that a performative thing
to people? Just are got they compelled to do it
by habit? What is it indicating even refreshment satisfaction.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
I think it's nostalgia. I think it's also something people
have been brainwashed into doing. But folks, if you like us,
have spent a lot of time in the Southeast, you
recognize that pop and that maybe there's some science to it,
maybe aspirating like that makes the water a little spicier.
(01:28):
A yeah, this is our story about something just patently ridiculous.
And guys, are we soda fans? I don't think either
of you guys are really.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
On the pop. I am a DDP man. Okay, it
means diet doctor Pepper. Oh, okay, I think it is
the superior diet soda. I used to be a DC man,
but now I'm exclusively a DDP man. And other than that,
only a fizzy water. And lately I've been making pomegranate
fizzy water spritzers, which is kind of like a soda
that you make at home. Hmmm. Nice. What about you, Max? Uh?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Personally A, I love that you drop the pop reference
right there. Of course, as a native Midwesterner, the word
pop is just burned into my memory. But it has
been many years since I've had a soda pop. Whoa, Yeah,
well a Coca Cola and most soda pops are not
conditioned there. But also I before that it would be
(02:28):
it was a very rare occasion. I just I know,
I like soda when I was younger, but I don't know.
I around my mid twenties, I just stopped drinking it.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Well, it is bonkers to me that some people just
drink it as they're like only of fluid. Yeah, it's
the source of hydration.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah, this is a special occasion for me, guys.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I'm a whole street Coca cola zero.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Uh, I don't know if I could take the unletted
here in my ancient years.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
You know, when I'll have the unletted occasionally been and
only then is on an airplane, will I will get
a full flavored coke because they don't give you the
whole can and it's with ice. So it's just sort
of like, oh, what was that like? Let me remind
myself what that tastes like?
Speaker 1 (03:11):
And it is the taste of a generation, and it
will taste different on a plane due to the high altitude. Yeah,
maybe we know that soda is not for everyone, and
we are not going to pretend it's the most healthy
thing you can drink. But hot dog, folks, is it tasty?
You can find all sorts of spins on the basic ingredients, right, sugar,
(03:35):
flavored syrup, carbonated water, a little bit of acid.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Some sodas like it makes it really kick, really kicks.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Some sodas like Coca cola, pepsi, you know, you know
them all the world round, and then others are more
regionally famous, like have you guys ever tried a cheer
wine or.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Doctor enough, Doctor enough? It's just enough. Ben, I think
I mentioned to you the other day that I've been
really enjoying rewatching and watching some of it for the
first time. A sketch comedy show called The Birthday Boys,
and they did a fantastic sketch where there's that old
trope of like, you know, the two guys that know
(04:16):
the secret recipe to coca cola never allowed to like
fly on the same plane together or even like you know,
I guess the lore the exaggerated version goes be in
the same room together. Well, in this Birthday Boys sketch,
they're best friends and they're one of them is like
on an interview show and he's asking him about so
what's the deal with the whole like you and the
other guys. Oh, he's right over there. We drove here together.
(04:38):
We're gonna go to a movie later, you want to come,
And then the guys that know the pepsi recipe are
also there. And then later on the two guys that
know the tab recipe saunter in and nobody cares about
what happens to them.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Oh my gosh. The only person I knew who an
ironically drank tab was our old mentor and original boss,
Roxanne Reed. She actually liked it. I thought it was
a bit for years.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
I don't understand what tab is. I think it's basically
just like generic diet cola that doesn't taste like anything
in particular. But I can't really speak to it, Ben,
because I've never I've never had the pleasure.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
It's I've had the unfortunate experience. It answers the question
I guess some customers have where they're drinking a different
soda and they say, what if this tasted terrible?
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Right? What if it was this but bad?
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Kind of like Dr pepper twenty three secret ingredients and
they're all poop.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Now, Ben, you know, I'm a Doctor pepper Man, although
I'm really more of a of a DDP man, but
I will occasionally have a full flavor one of those
as a treat as well. But Ben, you know who
did take something that everybody loved and thought what if
it was this but bad? Well? It was the Coca
Cola company, That's right. Yes, episode's all about that is
(05:54):
and I think that's what they were doing. They thought
they were being real crafty and smart, and they were
telling them the public a new idea that this is gonna,
you know, take take coke into the future. And of course,
as we sit and record this, and as we sit
in most days of our lives, we find ourselves in
the fair metropolis that is Atlanta, Georgia, home of the
(06:15):
Atlanta Braves, chicken wings, and coc colon.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
And you've probably heard countless stories from the Great Soda Wars,
like how companies work to keep their recipe secret, or
how this is a true story, folks, PEPSI was briefly
a naval force, But today we're looking at something different.
This spicy little sip or ridiculous history is coming to
us from none other than, as you said, NOL, Atlanta's
(06:47):
own Coca Cola. We can all agree Coke is a
massive success story, but we can also agree they did
not get everything right. So grab your favorite ashy snack
of choice. What goes better with a soda? We leave
it to you. This may be a two parter, or
(07:07):
dare we say a two leader. Perhaps the best example
of a swing and a miss by our friends at
Coke is something called New Coke. New Coke, and stay
tuned for some conspiracies at the end.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Nol, we've talked about this fella recently. Ben, When does
this come up in recent episodees talking about John as Pemberton,
the pharmacist.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
With oh gosh, yeah, we have talked about him in
the past. I think it's.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Recently and I can't remember what it was.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
It's weird because we have, you know, we have a
bit of a bubble of information, folks, Max Noll and yours. Truly,
We're going to keep the origin story short, partially because
it could be it's an old episode, partially because, as
you pointed out, Nol, we probably end up talking about
this pretty often, but mainly because, folks, everybody who grew
(08:01):
up in Georgia already knows the origin story of Coca cola,
chapter and verse. Yeah, take us to Pemberton.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Man, Well, I did kind of forget that. Johnny p
not to be confused with Johnny Pemberton, who's a delightful
comedian and actor, was actually a colonel in the Civil
War for the Batties.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
A Confederate colonel, he had sustained some pretty gnarly injuries,
and this led to him picking up an equally gnarly
morphine addiction.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Oh yeah, a monkey on his back. After the war,
he desperately searched for something to kick the habit. With yeah,
and it was the right thing to do.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
This is the mid eighteen eighties. He is based in
Columbus at the time, and he originally comes up with
something he calls Pemberton's French Wine coca.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Okay, yeah, so cocaine juice, yes, with alcohol and caffeine.
Let's replace my morphine addiction with alcoholism and cocaine addiction.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Right, Yeah, And the issue was Pemberton's French Wine coca.
It's sold, okay, I know, but also French wine feels
it's weird to say both of those.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
It's a little redundant a bit.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And this this concoction wasn't quite scratching the itch for him,
if you get what we're saying.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
So now he's French invented wine. It just seems like
putting a hat on a hat.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
It does, Yeah, because when Americans think of wine, they
already think of France, you know what I mean. Nobody's
like wine, oh, Spanish, even though there are lots of
Spanish wines.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Absolutely, and some people might think of Italy, but I
certainly think of France.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, right, I'm right there with you, man. So it's
eighteen eighty six Atlanta and the larger Fulton County passed
prohibition laws because they hated fun and so in response,
our buddy Johnny makes a non alcoholic version of Pemberton's
French Wine. He does up the cocaine quotient, right, He
(10:07):
calls it well, his bookkeeper tells him to call it
coca cola. That's the basic story. And yes, as you
can tell, folks, we are familiar with the rumors. They
are true. Up until about nineteen oh three, the original
Coca Cola, Coca Cola Classic as it would later be called,
(10:28):
did contain cocaine. Like we say, it was a different time.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
And actually again this must have come up on her stuff.
They don't want you to know. But to this day,
the cocaine that would be a byproduct of the coca
that's used to make Coca cola like goes somewhere. It
does exist, and they generate a ton of the stuff
every single year.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
To jump in here, a great minds thingle light like
also nol in my mind thinks like as well as
I was about to jump in here and ask that
exact same question, because I was talking to a doctor
friend of mine and I'm not to get the nose
procedure done. She's like, Oh, yeah, they're gonn numbing up.
I'm like, probably with a bunch of a cocaine from
Coca cola.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
That's what it is. It goes to the dental Yes,
it goes to malancrot pharmaceuticals. The cocaine byproduct extracted from
coca leaves used to flavor coca cola is sold to
a pharmaceutical company and often used in various topical forms.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Because of the numbing effect, I believe. So there is
so much more to the history of Coca cola. That's
a That's a drink for another day. For now, let's
fast forward skirt skirt across Coke's expansion throughout the US
and then later across the planet. At the close of
World War Two, Coca Cola controls something like sixty percent
(11:47):
of the entire market share for cola. This is a
catbird seat. But we all know the problem with being
the king of the hill. Kings have a tendency to fall.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
That's true, and if you take a shot at the king,
you're best not messed. That doesn't really apply here, but
it's an expression that I enjoy.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Yes, ed, we know that Coke already by this point
has an arch rival, Pepsi.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Ah.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Pepsi is hot on Coca Cola's heels. For a time
it looked as though Pepsi might win the soda wars.
It's if you look at nineteen eighty three, you see
the Coke's market share, which again used to be sixty percent,
has decreased by more than half, all the way down
to under twenty four percent. And the issue here is
(12:34):
that Pepsi is out selling Coke in grocery stores and markets.
Coke is barely hanging on because they have all these
legacy deals with big institutions. They have armies of vending machines,
they have an exclusivity agreement with the fast food giant McDonald's,
(12:55):
so that's where they're making their money.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
For sure, and that's obviously still very much a thing today.
I am always bummed out when I go to a
place and realize they only sell Pepsi products, because I
just think pepsi is gross. I do not like the
way it tastes, and again not a soda drinker, but
I just think it's not a local bias. Coke just
unequivocally tastes better than pepsi. So Coke did respond to this,
(13:18):
you know, potential catastrophe of you know, pepsi just eating
up all their market share in multiple ways. Their marketing
folks believe that these aging baby boomers would become increasingly
likely to drink diet sodas or you know, maybe like
switched to water as they became more health and weight
(13:39):
conscious over time. So any growth and what they in
the industry refers to as full calorie sodas would have
to come from younger customers, you know, buying things like
Surge and Josta. H. Yeah, remember those, they said those
in schools.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
M h.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
I'm a fan of Jolt as well, and the Serge
people gave me and my cohort a bunch of Surge
themed CDs.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Back in the day.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
I think I still have one. But anyhow, what what
we know is that they were they were onto something,
because these young customers are always going to be the
golden goose for marketing, and it seems these kids who
maybe liked the higher sugar sweetness content they dug pepsi.
(14:27):
And there's also a cultural thing that occurs because coke
is seen by part of this younger demographic as a
member of the stodgy status quo and Pepsi, in contrast,
is a little more exciting, a little bit more edgy.
So the folks at Coca Cola started asking themselves, how
do we make coke cool?
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Again?
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Very important question, but the co came back right right,
and someone said, uh, Jeremy, you're.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Crazy, Sorry about that. We're gonna need to do this
my way.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
At the same time, you know, this question becomes a
time sensitive question. It's no longer abstract because they can
see that across the board customers are purchasing less cola.
In general, the market is as you mentioned there, nol,
it's shifting to diet drinks and non soda soft drinks,
(15:24):
and Coke does manufacture and sell quite a lot of
those alternative beverages. But they still felt the writing was
on the wall. Harumph, hrrumph. Something had to be done.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Well, and they weren't going to just let their flagship
legacy cash cow brand recognition beverage slip away. Oh yeah,
absolutely not, because it's still a Leviathan, right, And it's
not just a twelve ounce can or a bottle or
a six and a half ounce bottle. At this point,
(16:04):
it is a. It is a piece of identity, a
nostalgia for a lot of people. So into the scene
strolls one of those move fast and break things kind
of guys, a new CEO with the name of Roberto Goizueta, Gitsueta,
who truly takes on this attitude that nothing is sacred,
(16:30):
not even the holiest of holy, the you know, original
recipe Coca cola. This happens in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Yeah, and he says, look this, he first gets the
position in nineteen eighty, right, and he is, like you said,
he's kind of a cowboy, right, and he's a coke
man for sure. He had previously worked in the Bahamas
for the Coke subsidiary there, which will come into play.
They decided to create their own version of skunk Works.
(17:01):
Skunk Works is famously here in the US. It is
the secret arm of Lockheed Martin that works on you know,
the spy planes.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
And the real spooky stuff. Yeah, I'm sort of a
military Willy Wonka kind of situation exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
That's a great way to put it. So Coke is
making their own kind of skunk Works, and the ZX,
which is I think a pretty cool term for executives
what do we think? Okay, the X All right, So
the ZX go to their marketing VP at the time,
a guy named Sergio Zimon, and their USA Coca Cola president,
(17:37):
a guy named Brian Dyson, and they say, all right,
we're gonna have a top secret operation. We are going
to mess with the original formula and no one can know.
So we have to call it a code name, and
we're going to call it Project Kansas.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah, not to be confused with the Florida Project. There's
no reason you would confuse it. I just think it's
funny when these big covert things are named in such
dull and uninteresting ways.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
And what was the Florida Project? Again?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Was that Disney Disney? Yeah, it was the way it
was like, it was the code name used so that
no one would know that the Walt Disney Corporation was
secretly buying up all this land on the cheap.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
In the Reedy Creek district.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
We have an episode about that too on stuff They'll
let you know.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Also the name of excellent film about folks living in
some of the low rent, kind of disney fied motels
on the outskirts of Disneyland there in Florida in Orlando.
The filmmaker that did that went on to win an
Oscar for Anora. It's one of his early early ones.
And I think it's phenomenal awesome.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Yeah, and Project Kansas you might be seeing. Hey, guys,
you made such a big deal about Coca Cola being
a cultural institution in Atlanta. Why is this called Project Kansas? Well, folks,
it is named after an internally famous photo of a
journalist named William Allen White. In the photo, he is
(19:05):
just looking housing a Coca Cola. We're kidding. He's sipping
it through a straw like a little punk.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
But he does look like a dainty fellow with his
with his bowler hat on, standing at the soda fountain,
just sipping away, clutching the glass, the tiny glass, and
he's clutching the glass and the straw and just seems
like he's having a good old time. Oh I like
this pever sure.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Carbonated stuff through a straw. Anyway, It's unusual, man, it's unusual.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Well yeah, if it's got ice, yeah, that changes.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
He's also a small cup like cup I'm looking at nice.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
I think that was back when they mixed it on
the and yeah, on the fly, and yeah, the soda
jerks and I think they did use sort of smaller
cups back in those.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
And there's a guy in the background who's just drinking
it without a straw straight.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah, like a couple of it looked like a bunch
of gangsters, so like they're about to do a heist. Actually,
everyone accept our man in the front. He just looks
like an old man that wandered onto the scene. And
then these g men are in the back and joining
their sodas a little more, you know, covertly.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
And this photo please do look it up if you
if you get a second again. That journalist is named
William Allen White. Kansas journalists Koch loved this photograph. They
had used it in all sorts of marketing campaigns, and
if you walked around the zech's offices, you would see
that several of them had prints of this photo, large
(20:34):
prints that they would hang up on their office walls.
So that's why they called it the Kansas Project. Sergio
and Brian are looking back at the data they have
from numerous blind taste tests, surveys and focus groups, and
they emphasized the taste test because most of the taste
(20:56):
tests tell them that when customers go don't know which
pop or soda they're drinking, they tend to prefer pepsi
because it has a sweeter taste.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Boers to me, Man, Bogers, I mean, it's like coke
has a flavor. Pepsi just kind of tastes like overly
saccharine syrup water.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Do you guys think that people drink because I know
a lot of people order it a bar, like a
whiskey and a coke or a jack and coke or something.
Do people do that with pepsi?
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yes, they very much do. Like I have, like you know,
I still have like family back in like Michigan and
stuff like that, and they'll talk about like, oh yeah,
when the bar and got a jack and pepsi. I'm like,
oh what, And it actually sounds like foreign to you.
It's like what is this? What is this cocktaiin I've
never heard.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Of it, much like restaurants would. In particular, bars tend
to have a coke or pepsi not.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
Yeah, so, at least in my experience in Atlanta, we
basically get all your soda boxes from a specific distributor,
so you get like all and they usually will have
coke that stripul will either have coke or pepsi or
something other things. So yeah, that's how it's exactly the
same as it would be able to change. So, like
you know, I think was a KFCs pepsi products, but
(22:10):
that's r mc donald's, yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Because they're part of young brands Taco Bell as well.
And while I can't I can't stand pepsi, I do
love a Baja.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Blast, But in Atlanta, you know, it's just such a
coke area that like everything is like it's like I
remember being like we were just talking about one time
just in general, and it was like massively more expensive
and even just do pepsi.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Pepsi's kind of king yes still and in the Midwest
and in the Pacific Northwest, and yeah, you're what you're
saying there.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Max ties into this idea of monopolization of distribution channels,
which is another part of coke's success, to be quite honest,
as well as pepsi's. And this marketing is confusing to
Sergio and Brian because, as we mentioned earlier, they already
had other research that told them that a lot of
(23:03):
people were shifting away from the calorie heavy, super sweet stuff.
So why do these blind taste tests seem to emphasize
really sweet things. It might be because the first sweet
sip is cool, but it doesn't mean you would want
one hundred other SIPs of equal sweetness. Still, the facts
are the facts. So these guys went back and they
(23:25):
fused with the Holy Grail, the secret formula for Coca Cola.
They mainly made it sweeter, logical move, and then they
put that secret still very sweet soda into fresh rounds
of taste tests. So now you would have like three cups.
You would have a little cup of unidentified pepsi, a
(23:46):
little cup of secret Coca Cola, and a little cup
of what they were not yet calling new coke. And
this gets really interesting because they do some of these
taste tests in the Southeast United States, the historic cultural
stronghold of Coca Cola, and the customers there seem to
(24:07):
prefer the new flavor. And then once somebody unveils the
results and says, hey, this is also a Coca Cola product,
the brand loyalty kicks in. Guys, the brainwashing kicks in,
and they say.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Oh, this is coke.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Well, I love coke, so I love this too.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
For sure, And so they're hoping anyway. I mean, you know,
because it is there's a certain amount of nostalgia at
play in a brand like that that has such historical
roots and all of the imagery and gets credited for
being like responsible for the modern version of Santa Claus
and you know, all of these things that are kind
of wrapped up in American culture, and this guy kind
(24:48):
of overplaces hand a bit and thinking that that stuff's
going to be the stuff that's going to earn them
some good will. But in fact, what he's done here
is kind of took a big old poop on all
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, so there's a true story. In the taste test,
this stuff was so popular that one of their bottling
companies liked it so much they threatened to sue Coca
Cola if the company didn't actually roll out the product.
And to explain this really quickly, because Coca Cola is
(25:29):
such a big company, a lot of us regular consumers
Johnny Blue Jeans on the street, we're not aware that
the bottling companies are going to be third parties. Pretty
often they have a contract with Coca Cola proper, but
they're their own thing and they just happened to have
a deal that allows them to make coke products.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yeah, and as we also know or maybe you don't,
when it comes to these types of companies, you got
to like make these orders way in advance in order
to make uh deadlines for product rolls rollouts, and it's
it's it's a it's a whole thing where you sometimes
have to schedule these productions like year a year in
demand sometimes. So it would absolutely be a problem if
(26:13):
all of a sudden they didn't have that business because
they've literally, you know, rejected other business in favor of
being ready to go with this new product rollout for coke.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
And it's an interesting corporate position too, write interesting business
arrangement because you are you are your own company. You
are not Coca Cola. But if someone asks you what
you make, you make one hundred percent Coca Cola products.
It's got to like being a contract worker in a way.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
So this is all great news for Sergio and Brian.
It is the type of stuff that sounds awesome in
a boardroom, but the marketing is not as solid as
it may have looked at first glance. People in general,
as we know, tend to dislike change, especially if we
feel a nostalgic or emotional relationship with the status quo.
(27:07):
So this this cracked me up. I hope we all
enjoy this too. In one of the taste tests facts
or Takeaways, they found that somewhere around ten to twelve
percent of customers weren't just saying they didn't like this
new flavor. They said they were deeply angry at the
(27:29):
idea that anybody would replace Coca Cola. They felt personally offended.
They would stop drinking the stuff entirely if this crap
was going to be the new flavor. That's a very
visceral reaction to something as you know, mundane as soda pop.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
But still most people said that they you know, the
focus group types would they would accept the change, though
they also said it would take you know a little
time to get used to.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Yeah. And we know that this data is again not
just coming from blind taste test, it's also coming from
surveys and focus groups, and marketing calculus at the time
placed much more importance on the surveys, especially because they
were less negative than the taste test. So now they're
(28:20):
armed with the information that works best for them. Our
pals Sergio and Brian are able to convince the ZX
to change Coke's Holy Grail formula in nineteen eighty five,
and in this conversation they also, by the way, downplayed
the repeated and consistent predictions of focus groups. Pretty much
(28:43):
every focus group they asked told them the general public
is not going to like it if you guys change
the recipe. If you tell them that you're changing something
they associate with, you know, roller skating rinks in summer
camp and fun times as a child, they're going to
hate you. What happens next has been reviewed, discussed, analyzed extensively,
(29:09):
and obsessed over for decades. It remains a standard topic
of study in business and marketing schools even today. So
the first big discussion after green lighting this idea of
what would become called new Coke was whether we make
it a replacement entirely for the old stuff, or whether
(29:30):
we make it a new, separate addition to Coke's roster. Right,
we know stuff like this, It already happened recently. Diet
Coke came out in nineteen eighty two. Side note, diet
Pepsi came out in nineteen sixty four, well late to
the game there, guys. But these bodily associates of Coke
(29:51):
Proper were already really pod that they had to make
diet coke. It threw off their whole production process. And
so a lot of these companies had already sued Coca
Cola over syrup price fixing, which we didn't know was
a thing, and the situation was getting even stickier with
(30:13):
the rollout of Cherry coke. Yeah, they were divided in
the boardroom from the beginning. Some members of management were
concerned that this would be a win for Pepsi if
they had two separate versions.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Of coke, and this, you know, immediately creates a problem
of brand dilution and this idea of you know, just
confusing the public, confusing their customers and cannibalizing their own sales.
But Sergio and Brian did have support from the CEO.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Yeah, the King is on your side. It turns out
that our pal Roberto we mentioned that he had a
background in the Bahamas. He's from Cuba. Originally he said,
hang on, I've tried something like this in the past.
Back in the early days of my career as a cokeman,
I ran the Bahamas subsidiary, and we looked into local preferences.
(31:09):
We tweaked the flavors slightly, and when we did that,
we significantly improved sales in that market. So, you guys,
says Robertel, I'm all about refinement and replacement. It worked
before for me, so why can't it work now on
a larger scale. He argued, the company needs to make
the change not an addition to the product line, but
(31:31):
a full replacement. And he says, we're not doing it
in secret, We're doing it publicly. It is new coke
or no coke. And we're also we're gonna have different
packages and we'll have a little line that says new
exclamation mark on the label. That's where we get the
street name new Coke.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Exactly new coke. Hets the market on April twenty third,
nineteen eighty five, and that same week Coke stops production
oof of the original formula. For a while, new coke
was sold in the same coke packaging. The bottlers still
had left over labels, cartons and cans, and there was
(32:13):
a huge press conference in New York City to announce
this initiative. However, it did not go well. PEPSI was
likely responsible for this. Feeding reporters you know, uncomfortable questions,
guait Sueta pointed out Coke's original formula had been altered
in the past. This was not anything new, he said,
(32:35):
specifically back in nineteen thirty five to get Kosher certification. However,
he wouldn't acknowledge taste tests as their motivation because that
would have implied the first formula wasn't like, you know,
the American classic that everyone knew and loved to begin with. Instead,
he got defensive, which is never a good.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Look with reporters.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, I mean, wow, you know, it seems like it's
part of the course these days, but still a lot
of good look and especially if you're you know, it's
like it's like someone's saying, you're just not getting what
I'm what I'm my vision is here.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
You know, you're a nasty woman. You should smile more.
Uh uh, We're not here to villify Roberto. You guys
know who we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Instead.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Uh So, one of these reporters asked him if diet
Coke would also be reformulated if assuming new Coke is
a success, and our CEO flipped out. He famously replied, no,
and I didn't assume that this is a success. This
(33:39):
is a success.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Oh no, man, just because you say it is, I
doesn't doesn't mean it is.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
I mean, what's a more successful route of ever proving
somebody wrong than just vehemently denying the truth.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Well again, we're seeing quite a lot of that these days,
and it's crazy making. But here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (33:59):
For time, New Coke was indeed a success story until
it wasn't. And with that we're going to pause. We
can't wait to get to the second leader of this
two liter episode. Please tune in for the the crazy
part of the story in our second part of the
(34:22):
Bizarre Saga of New Coke. Big big thanks or super
producer mister Max Williams, Big thanks to Oh gosh, does
Jonathan Strickland ak the Twister drink Coca Cola?
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Does you know?
Speaker 3 (34:34):
I mean probably an Arcy Cola fan?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
I bet he is.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Wow, everybody's catching strays today.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
No, it's true, ARSI call is not the worst. It's
just it's just like kind of generic. It's just generic,
and everything's generic compared to Coke Classic, especially New Coke.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Okay, now I got a better one. I got better
Jonathan Strickland goes to the world of coke so you
can stand there and only drink Beverly.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Oh, he loves bever Beverly is terrible. Yeah, that's the
correct answer. I almost spat out my coke zero for
anybody who doesn't know. Beverly is best described as a
war crime. That you can drink it is. I think
it's a digestive or yeah, it's a digestive.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
I think taste like for net hmm, okay, so liquid
tube paste. It's just terrible. Yeah, not good. And that
is something that you can I believe still to this day.
Sample at the Coke Museum here in Atlanta, the World
of Coke.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Yes, that's the way they ruin in the field trip
for countless school children. Your faithful correspondents include it. Speaking
to a correspondent's Big Big thanks to doctor Rachel Big
Spinach Lance, as well as the rude Dudes of Ridiculous Crime.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Huge thanks to aj Bahamas, Jacobs, the Puzzler, and Jonathan
Strickland aka the Quizzer, as well as us Jeff Coats
and Christophroscio. Is here in spirit.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
All right, folks, crack open a cold one for us.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Will be back see you next time, folks. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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