New Book By Dr. Hull!

Splenda^®: Is It Safe Or Not?
Dr. Janet Hull reveals the scientific evidence strongly suggesting the chemical sweetener sucralose may harm your body. Visit Is Splenda Safe.com for more information!

Diet Coke with Splenda

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/22/BUGHOBEBE31.DTL

Corporate giants try to squeeze new profits from old products Diet Coke, Tide getting new versions
- Bruce Mohl, Boston Globe
Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Two huge consumer brands have been busy cloning themselves.

Procter & Gamble Co. rolled out a cold-water version of its blockbuster Tide laundry detergent earlier this month. Coca-Cola Co., meanwhile, unveiled plans to start selling a seventh version of Diet Coke, this time sweetened with Splenda instead of aspartame.

In the parlance of marketing professionals, both companies were doing line extensions, trying to expand the popularity of an existing brand by tweaking it slightly or significantly. Each time a company comes up with a new and improved version of an old product -- and there are thousands of them each year -- a consumer has to decide whether the new version is really any better.

"It's confusing. There's no doubt about it," said Kathleen Seiders, associate professor of marketing at Boston College. "It can get very complicated when people go into the supermarket and see 45 versions of Tide."

The reason companies do so many line extensions and product reformulations is because it's far less risky than creating a new product. It's a way of testing the waters to see whether a consumer need can be filled by tweaking an existing product. The trick, from the marketer's standpoint, is to attract new customers without alienating too many of the existing ones.

Coca-Cola, which had a disastrous experience trying to replace original Coke with New Coke in 1985, is now about as cautious as you can get in tinkering with its current products.

Last week, it said it would add another version of its market-leading Diet Coke that would substitute one synthetic sweetener for another. The new Diet Coke with Splenda will complement, but not replace, the existing Diet Coke with aspartame.

"Many consumers told us they liked the taste of Splenda and wanted a Splenda-sweetened option under the Diet Coke brand, so we're obliging them," said Dan Dillon Jr., a Coca-Cola vice president. "The millions of current Diet Coke devotees across America shouldn't be concerned -- the Diet Coke they love will stay just as it is."

Coke management is probably hoping that Diet Coke with Splenda will bring new customers to the brand, but the move is also a way of easing existing customers ever so gently toward Splenda. The new Diet Coke packaging will feature the name of the sweetener and a yellow streak on the front label. Usually such information is buried in the fine print on the back.

PepsiCo Inc. is making a similar move, replacing the aspartame in its one- calorie Pepsi One product with Splenda, while leaving its aspartame-sweetened Diet Pepsi unchanged.

Sales of Splenda, the brand name for sucralose, are exploding, while aspartame appears to be fading. Splenda has a longer shelf life and doesn't react to heat, and Johnson & Johnson, the marketer of Splenda in the United States, makes it sound almost natural.

"It's made from sugar so it tastes like sugar, with no unpleasant aftertaste," the company says in its literature, downplaying the fact that Splenda is created by adding chlorine atoms to sucrose, or table sugar.

Whole Foods Market, the chain that bars what it considers unhealthy products from its aisles, refuses to stock any product that contains either aspartame or Splenda. On its Web site, Whole Foods said it has "avoided selling nonnutritive artificial sweeteners because they are not in concordance with our philosophy of promoting 'real' food."

Like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble is rolling out a new version of a popular product without dumping the old one. But the approach being taken by P&G is much more risky because of the way the company is positioning its new Coldwater Tide.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/22/BUGHOBEBE31.DTL

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/2
2//chronicle/info/copyright/ ©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

Posted on May 23, 2005 in Splenda Toxicity | Link To This Entry | Comments (4)

Comments

Posted by: Vicki Snyder on July 4, 2005 3:55 PM

 

Posted by: Eric on October 16, 2005 5:15 PM

 

Posted by: Janet Hull on November 9, 2005 12:48 PM

 

Posted by: nitya on January 7, 2006 2:27 AM