“Soft Drinks, Hard Knocks: Carbonation, Polarization, and Pepsi”
Op-ed commentary by Richard Speer
(plain-text version)
© 2005
The Greek thinker Aristotle has been dead for 2,327 years, but it took the recent failure of an American soft drink to drive the final nail into his coffin. The philosopher who preached “Moderation in all things” might well have loved the beverage Pepsi Edge had it been available in Ancient Athens, for the now-defunct “mid-calorie” cola was a veritable Golden Mean between corn-syrupy original Pepsi and anemically aspartamic Diet Pepsi. As of this month, however, Pepsi Edge—a lame duck since May, when its gradual phase-out was announced—has all but disappeared from store shelves, the victim of an American palate that has become as staunchly polarized as American politics.
When it was rolled out in the summer of 2004, Pepsi Edge targeted the 60-million American consumers who drink both regular and diet soft drinks. Marketers call these consumers “dual users,” and Pepsi execs pointed to statistics showing that the number of dual users had increased by 75% over the preceding two years. Armed with these numbers and a formula blending yummy high-fructose corn syrup with sensible Splenda, they created Pepsi Edge, which had 50 calories to original Pepsi’s 100 and Diet Pepsi’s zero calories per 8-ounce serving. The beverage was launched with the slogan, “With 50% less sugar, calories, and carbs, you can reward yourself for just about anything,” a chirpy tagline that suggested that moderation itself was a cause for celebration, that walking the 50-yard line between gluttony and asceticism was tantamount to the good life.
It was a proposition that would have pleased Aristotle, as well as his teacher, Plato, a seminal figure in the discipline of dialectics. Dialectics (not to be confused with diuretics, or, even worse, Dianetics) was a method of argumentation that considered the merits and drawbacks of opposing positions, ultimately arriving at a middle-ground solution that encompassed the truths but neutralized the extremism of polar viewpoints. Thesis + antithesis = synthesis. Or, as poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to put it in his 1825 Aids to Reflection, “Extremes meet.”
In this tradition, Pepsi Edge would seem a progressive achievement: carbonated enlightenment in a can. There was just one problem. Americans didn’t buy it. Less than a year after the product’s launch, Pepsi announced it would gradually phase the beverage out. According to public relations director Dave DeCecco, Pepsi halted production of the concentrate used to make the drink in mid-October, which means that right about now, stores that had stocked it are seeing their inventory dwindling or depleted. Because I liked Pepsi Edge and was disappointed by its failure, I called Dave DeCecco and asked him why it had flopped. “The mid-calorie cola market really hasn’t met expectations,” he said. “What we learned was that if consumers are looking to cut calories, they want to cut all the calories.”
And there it is: the all-or-nothing mentality that has turned the United States into one of the most virulently anti-dialectic nations on earth. We cannot, will not, tolerate moderation, even in our soft drinks. Thoughtfully trading a modicum of taste for a corresponding reduction in calories is not a proposition that interests us—we are either going to gorge or starve ourselves, which is why the eating strategy (“Eat for pleasure, but in moderation.”) espoused in Mireille Guiliano’s recent bestseller, French Women Don’t Get Fat, will never take hold in this country, where far too many of us careen between binging and bulimia. No, it’s our way or the highway in food, drink, and beyond—on Iraq, abortion, assisted suicide, creationism versus evolution, and on down the headlines as we pit Bill O’Reilly against Jon Stewart, Rush Limbaugh against Al Franken, Dennis Miller against Bill Maher.
If there is any consolation prize for temperate, erstwhile Pepsi Edge fans, it may be Coca-Cola’s C2, a soft drink also launched in the summer of 2004 and also featuring half the calories and carbs of the brand’s flagship formula. Unlike its vanquished competitor, C2 is still on store shelves, and Scott Williamson, spokesperson for Coca-Cola North America, insists, “We continue to be pleased with C2’s performance.” This assurance comes in spite of a May report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which asserted that “C2 hasn’t had a strong start” and that 2004 sales “were far lower than the comparable introduction of Vanilla Coke.” On an equally ominous but purely anecdotal note, the Safeway where I shop in downtown Portland, Oregon, stopped carrying C2 two weeks ago, although local Fred Meyer supermarkets continue to stock it. I really want C2 to succeed, for reasons that extend way beyond calories and carbs.
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