It may have seemed like a good idea to someone at the time.
Forty years ago this spring, the Coca-Cola Company, moving on from the taste that had addicted millions of people around the globe for nearly a century, decided to try something new.
That something new was soon popularly known as New Coke, and it shortly turned into one of the greatest marketing disasters of all time.
According to a recent issue of the publication Remind Magazine, the Coca-Cola company decided to try something new because its market had become lethargic, seeing a “slipping share lead” over Pepsi Cola.
Coca-Cola itself said that in taste tests upwards of 200,000 people said they preferred the taste of New Coke over the traditional Coke. When that new product was rolled out, Roberto Goizueta, then chief executive officer of Coca-Cola, described it as the “surest move ever made because the taste of Coke was shaped by the taste of the consumer.”
But the taste test sample, even at 200,000 people, was apparently not large enough, according to author Thomas Oliver, who wrote a book about the angry consumer reaction called The Real Coke: The Real Story.
In just over two months, Coca-Cola officials held a press conference and did, wrote Oliver, the unthinkable: they “publicly apologized to the American people.”
“Never before had a major corporation told the American people that it was sorry, never before had a corporate giant begged consumers for forgiveness,” noted Oliver, “and never was an apology so quickly accepted.”
How upset were those consumers? One man said he was dividing his life into “B.C. and A.C.,” marking the epochs as when Coca-Cola was a regular part of his days and when it suddenly no longer existed. A sign in a public park in Atlanta read simply: “Our Children Will Never Know Refreshment.”
A man in Texas was said to have purchased some $1,000 worth of the original Coca-Cola from a local bottler, not unlike people buying multiple cases of liquor just before Prohibition became the law of the land in 1920.
According to the Palm Beach Post upwards of 8,000 angry calls a day were received at the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta.
Announcing that the company was returning to its tried-and-true formula, Goizueta said of the New Coke haters: “Our message to this group is simple. We have heard you.”
Coca-Cola was back on the nation’s grocery shelves exactly twelve weeks after it was discontinued. New Coke was rebranded as Coke II in 1990 before being phased out entirely in the summer of 2002.
But memories linger: a columnist for the South Carolina newspaper Index Journal last week said she remembered that New Coke had a “downright nasty flavor,” adding that “no southerner who has grown up drinking Coke is going to be satisfied with any other drink for their long-term favorite soda.”
May 9, 2025
By Garry Boulard
Vintage New Coke ad
