An avid diet soda drinker examines the zero sugar trend

I ordered my Diet A&W Cream Soda, and I quickly realized that something was different. My “diet” soda was no longer diet. Instead, it had become “zero sugar.”
This week I took the podcast Margins of Error in a thirst quenching direction to try to solve this marketing mystery and see if I should actually drink any of this.
I soon realized that A&W was no deviation. It was part of a trend.
Just take a walk down the local grocery store like I did and you will find that diet soda disappears. Brands like Canada Dry and Crush have replaced their diet sodas with “zero sugar”[ads1];, while others like Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper now have zero sugar options in addition to diet.
On top of that, Cantois told me that “diet is about deficiency, diet is about restraint, diet is about femininity in these negative but also painful ways.”
It turns out that this is not a new problem for low-calorie soda producers. Low-calorie soda, also called “diet” or “zero sugar,” has been around for 70 years, and how to market it has always been a difficult thing.
Do you lean completely on the idea of a diet, or do you lean on the idea of getting healthier by cutting sugar without losing flavor?
There were once a number of different low-calorie drinks – Diet Rite, Tab, Patio, Diet Pepsi and much later, Diet Coke – in the early days, and they went with different marketing strategies.
Blink until the 2000s, when the business with low-calorie soft drinks looked quite gloomy at the beginning of the current century. Sales of diet soda declined. Marketing ultimately comes down to what works commercially, and it was definitely time to move away from the diet.
Welcome to the country with “zero sugar” soda. Cantois claimed that from a marketing perspective, “zero strength and fullness and an increase in value. It has zero sugar as a good thing instead of diet like this pursuit of nothing.”
Coke Zero sold out Diet Pepsi last year, according to statistics from my colleague Danielle Wiener-Bronner, who covers the food sector for CNN Business. This made it the second most popular “low calorie carbonate”.
As you may have guessed, Diet Coke is still in first place. Nevertheless, from 2019 to 2021, Diet Coke’s market share fell by 3.3 percentage points, while Coke Zero increased by 3 percentage points.