Likely, I just recall one aunt who drank this exclusively and the cans of Tab were all hers. It was my first taste of a sugar free soda and she had nothing to fear from us after we each were given a glass. For the most part in the early seventies soda was a treat unlike today where I swear it replaces water for some people.
lets just say its an acquired taste and note that diet soft drinks did not have the selection there is today
Take a tea bag. Use it 10 or 20 times to make tea. Once done, leave it damp to collect mold, dirt, fungus.
After, once dried, clean it with bleach in an attempt to kill the mold, fungus, and other such things. Now quickly, with the bleach still dripping from it, run tepid water through it. Add brown food colouring.
It's a cola, and its flavor overlaps heavily with Diet Coke; indeed, it was Diet Coke before Diet Coke. The flavor profile was tweaked around the saccharin sweetener they had to use when it was introduced.
The flavor difference is on par with the difference between Coke and Pepsi: real and detectable, but all pretty much the same if you're not paying attention. Especially since Tab no longer uses saccharin alone.
"Though Diet Coke all but eclipsed Tab, the beverage company kept the throwback brand alive. The reason was customer relations. Tab fans were relentless, calling Coca-Cola headquarters and signing petitions if they couldn’t find their soda.
'We want to make sure those who want Tab get Tab,' Douglas Daft, Coca-Cola’s then-chairman and chief executive said in 2001, when Tab’s market share had fallen below 1%. 'It shows you care.' "
Sweetened with saccharine, described as having a metallic aftertaste.
I have had it but it's been awhile and I don't recall it well. My sense of the fan base is similar to what is mentioned in the article, that it had sort of a cult following. I'm surprised the company stuck with it so long. It makes me wonder if there's some genetic studies of taste preference it might have inspired.
Let's just say, it unwittingly created its own reputation, before ultra Xtreme hardcore to-the-max branding kicked in to the soda market: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9YLQTgQ7B4
> Anybody up for joining the "reduced-calorie segment"?
In all seriousness, yes, I'm actually thrilled at the continued prominence of sugar-free drinks. We still have an obesity epidemic going on, and sugar-free drinks to me seem like a true have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too offering. Having people switch from sugary sodas to their sugar-free equivalent seems like the easiest win to improve health.
I get the argument "Just drink water", but do the people making that argument really think that everyone is going to do this? And why should we anyway? Research continues to show that artificial sweeteners are harmless, and drinking soda is just plain fun.
Anecdotally, a lot of people I know who have trouble losing weight drink diet soda. I don't know what mechanism would cause that, but metabolism and satiety are complicated enough that I could believe there's a correlation. I'm lucky that artificial sweeteners taste disgusting to me anyways.
I don't think it's about calories, there's some speculation that artificial sweeteners still spike your insulin, messing with people's ability to lose weight.
This is likely misleading for two reasons: about half of Americans say they are trying to lose weight[1], and roughly 90% of people who lose a lot of weight eventually regain just about all of it[2].
So even if there is a mechanism that makes diet sodas counterproductive for weight loss, it's clearly part of a much broader problem. There are also possibly confounding factors, e.g. people most serious about their health and weight loss may have already determined that diet sodas are not good for them.
Because the environmental cost of producing, shipping and disposing carbonated drinks is nearly incalculably higher than just drinking tap water? Even you add a post-tap filter stage it's still magnitudes less impactful.
This is absolutely valid. I do welcome diet sodas as an alternative to regular sodas, but that concerns health outcomes, not environmental concerns. This problem applies to any drink that isn't tap water (including bottled water), so it's a separate discussion to be had from artificial sweeteners.
There's an endless amount of worthless junk science and not-science around anything deemed by some as "too artificial". Especially when it comes to nutrition.
> In 1962, Coca-Cola launched a crash program code-named “Project Alpha” to develop a competing diet cola [to Royal Crown's Diet-Rite Cola] and bring it to market in less than a year. The goal was to produce a low-calorie cola drink using saccharin and cyclamates instead of sugar while avoiding the typically unpleasant aftertaste that plagued other diet sodas. Coca-Cola met its goal with the introduction of TaB in May 1963, a diet cola advertised with the slogan “How can one calorie taste so good?
Personally, I hope they don't stop selling the normal Coca Cola but my gut feeling they will even more force Zero or Diet coke on us. And then just say Coca Cola is going away in a few years. I prefer the taste of normal Coca Cola as Zero or Diet taste metallically.
I think we had clear Coca Cola for a short while when I was a kid but it dead a silent death just like that 'green' Coca cola they introduced a few years ago.
Yeah, cause sugar addicts are - you know gonna kick the addiction and make it unsustainable for Coke or Coke is gonna do the right thing and take out sugar for the betterment of society, just like Heroine dealers are gonna find out it's bad for their customers and killing people so they're gonna sell safer alternatives to street drugs /s
Edit: Sorry if this seems snarky, not my intent, but to be clever/witty in stating that Coke will never end it's Sugary drinks. That's their $$$ cow.
54 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 99.1 ms ] thread"Tab uses a different recipe compared to Spain and the U.S., where it's a caffeine-free drink, and uses less carbonation."
Of course we were drinking it out of cans so that aspect of it didn't really have lasting appeal...
Marty: "Gimme a Tab"
Lou: "A tab? I can't give you a tab unless you order something"
--Back to the Future (1 not 2)
That was a bit of an obscure joke at the time, watching from Europe.
Edit: Oh my, I had the movie part wrong!
(He stayed clear of Lou's the second time around.)
Marty: "Alright, give me a Pepsi Free."
Lou: "You want a Pepsi, PAL, you're gonna pay for it."
And nobody in the UK had ever heard of that either... all in all a confusing scene :)
lets just say its an acquired taste and note that diet soft drinks did not have the selection there is today
Take a tea bag. Use it 10 or 20 times to make tea. Once done, leave it damp to collect mold, dirt, fungus.
After, once dried, clean it with bleach in an attempt to kill the mold, fungus, and other such things. Now quickly, with the bleach still dripping from it, run tepid water through it. Add brown food colouring.
I'm not sure, but this seems to be what Tab is.
The flavor difference is on par with the difference between Coke and Pepsi: real and detectable, but all pretty much the same if you're not paying attention. Especially since Tab no longer uses saccharin alone.
Sweetened with saccharine, described as having a metallic aftertaste.
I have had it but it's been awhile and I don't recall it well. My sense of the fan base is similar to what is mentioned in the article, that it had sort of a cult following. I'm surprised the company stuck with it so long. It makes me wonder if there's some genetic studies of taste preference it might have inspired.
If there was a contest for the least appealing appeal ever, this would be pretty high up there. Anybody up for joining the "reduced-calorie segment"?
In all seriousness, yes, I'm actually thrilled at the continued prominence of sugar-free drinks. We still have an obesity epidemic going on, and sugar-free drinks to me seem like a true have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too offering. Having people switch from sugary sodas to their sugar-free equivalent seems like the easiest win to improve health.
I get the argument "Just drink water", but do the people making that argument really think that everyone is going to do this? And why should we anyway? Research continues to show that artificial sweeteners are harmless, and drinking soda is just plain fun.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4135487/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28394643/
Jury's still out AFAIK though.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29159583/
So even if there is a mechanism that makes diet sodas counterproductive for weight loss, it's clearly part of a much broader problem. There are also possibly confounding factors, e.g. people most serious about their health and weight loss may have already determined that diet sodas are not good for them.
[1] https://time.com/5334532/weight-loss-americans/ [2] https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/health-management/weighing...
Because the environmental cost of producing, shipping and disposing carbonated drinks is nearly incalculably higher than just drinking tap water? Even you add a post-tap filter stage it's still magnitudes less impactful.
Hardly anything to dive into, though.
> In 1962, Coca-Cola launched a crash program code-named “Project Alpha” to develop a competing diet cola [to Royal Crown's Diet-Rite Cola] and bring it to market in less than a year. The goal was to produce a low-calorie cola drink using saccharin and cyclamates instead of sugar while avoiding the typically unpleasant aftertaste that plagued other diet sodas. Coca-Cola met its goal with the introduction of TaB in May 1963, a diet cola advertised with the slogan “How can one calorie taste so good?
[1] http://mentalfloss.com/article/547246/why-coca-cola-designed...
I think we had clear Coca Cola for a short while when I was a kid but it dead a silent death just like that 'green' Coca cola they introduced a few years ago.
Edit: Sorry if this seems snarky, not my intent, but to be clever/witty in stating that Coke will never end it's Sugary drinks. That's their $$$ cow.
I'm in South Africa.. I generally chose it over the other diet Cola drinks.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st6-DgWeuos