New Coke beat 190,000 tasters and fell in 79 days

Atlanta, 11 July 1985. Donald Keough, president of The Coca-Cola Company, sat down in front of the press to announce the return of a product his own company had pulled off the shelves seventy-nine days earlier. The old formula was going back on sale with a new surname, Coca-Cola classic, and the new one stayed beside it, in the same cooler, watching.

Seventy-nine days as the only Coca-Cola. From 23 April to 11 July. In that time the most studied soft-drink company in the world made a fool of itself with a product that had won, city by city, every comparison put in front of it.

That same afternoon ABC — one of the three great American television networks — cut into the episode of General Hospital, the afternoon medical soap watched by millions of housewives and students, and Peter Jennings delivered the news with a breaking-news banner. A change of recipe in a soft drink had landed in the same drawer as a plane crash or a resignation.

The weeks before explain that disproportion better than any report. The company's free consumer line, 1-800-GET-COKE, took about four hundred calls a day in normal times. In June it reached fifteen hundred. And they were not calling to talk about taste: they called furious, some of them in tears, to ask who had given anyone permission. More than forty thousand letters and calls of protest reached the Atlanta headquarters. A psychiatrist the company hired to listen to the recordings said some of them spoke like people who had just heard of a death in the family.

Some people bought cases of the old formula to freeze, and bottlers — the local firms that make and distribute the drink under licence — rang Atlanta to say lifelong customers were hanging up on them. David Pryor, senator for Arkansas, went up to the floor of the United States Senate to say that the return of the original formula was a meaningful moment in the country's history. They were talking about a fizzy drink.

In Seattle a retired man named Gay Mullins, who had made his living in public relations and knew perfectly well how a campaign is run, founded the Old Cola Drinkers of America, an association with a single point on its programme: bring back the old drink. He set up a phone line, gathered signatures, appeared on the news. And then he did something that should have sunk his cause: he agreed to a blind tasting in front of the cameras. He could not tell which was which. And when they asked him to pick the one he liked best, he pointed at the new one.

The technicians in Atlanta celebrated that as proof that the country had lost its mind and they had been right all along. It was exactly the other way round: Mullins had just shown them, live and free of charge, the flaw in their whole method.

Two things failed.

The first: a sip is not a can. In a tasting you drink a short mouthful from each glass and choose. In a short mouthful the sweeter option usually wins, because the sugar arrives fast and the palate is not yet tired. Drink the whole glass, or two cans in a row on an August afternoon, and that same sweetness cloys. The company had optimised its drink to win sipping contests.

The phenomenon has a name: sensory-specific satiety. Your liking for a flavour falls as you consume it, and it falls faster the more intense the flavour is. A product drunk by the litre, with meals, for years, cannot be designed by measuring the first thirty millilitres. It is like choosing a mattress by how comfortable it feels when you perch on the edge for a second.

The second is bigger and no amount of sugar fixes it. In none of those tastings was anybody asked how they would feel if the usual one disappeared. They were asked which tastes better, and people answered that. Nobody asked how much it hurts to lose the one you have been drinking since you were seven, the one from your father's bar, the one from the vending machines at school. That is why Mullins could prefer the new one blind and go on demanding the old one with the label showing, without lying once: he had been asked two different questions and he answered both honestly.

23 April 1985, Lincoln Center in New York, the complex of theatres and concert halls where the opera opens its season. Roberto Goizueta, born in Havana, a chemical engineer from Yale and chief executive since 1981, presented to seven hundred journalists the first new Coca-Cola formula in ninety-nine years. He spoke of boldness. Someone in the audience asked whether the old one would ever come back, and the answer was no.

The preceding months had been all laboratory and folding table. The company commissioned close to one hundred and ninety thousand blind tastings in cities across the country, a number that wins any meeting without discussion: nobody raises a hand against two hundred thousand tests. In those tastings the new formula — sweeter, rounder, without the citrus edge of the old one — beat the original and beat Pepsi too. It won narrowly, around 55 to 45 against the old formula and some eight points ahead of Pepsi, but it won in every city, and that was enough.

And there was the trap, hidden inside the success itself. One hundred and ninety thousand times the same short question gives a very precise answer about the one thing the company was not selling: anonymous sips.

With a small sample, somebody in the room would have raised a hand. With one hundred and ninety thousand, the number does the arguing and closes the discussion before it starts: you cannot answer that with a hunch. There were signals, too, and they were not read. In some tastings the participants asked, unprompted, whether the new one was going to replace the usual one; those who were told yes gave it lower scores. That was not noise: that was the whole market answering through a crack, and it was filed away as a curiosity of the questionnaire.

To understand why Coca-Cola agreed to play the sipping game you have to go further back still, to 1975.

That year Pepsi, the rival brand, began setting up tables in shopping centres in Texas: two white cups, no labels, one sip from each. They called it the Pepsi Challenge. People chose Pepsi more often than they chose Coca-Cola, and Pepsi put it on television with the startled face of someone who has just discovered they have spent half their life drinking the thing they did not prefer. It was a demonstration that fitted on a table and was understood in five seconds, and in a thirty-second commercial that is worth more than any report.

Coca-Cola had spent two decades watching its share fall, point by point, year after year. And it made the mistake everything else flows from: it accepted the opponent's playing field. If the rival was winning with covered cups and a single sip, the obvious solution, almost common sense, was to make a drink that would win with covered cups and a single sip. They made it, and it won the covered cups.

The three months that followed went on answering telephones.

What happened afterwards is the part least often told and the one that closes the account best. The new formula was not thrown out: it stayed in the catalogue, first under its own name and from 1992 rechristened Coke II, and it died slowly until it vanished altogether in the early two thousands. The old one, with classic on the can, ended 1985 selling more than before the whole mess. In Atlanta there are people who have maintained ever since that it was all planned.

On 11 July, in Atlanta, Keough got ahead of the question himself, in front of all the journalists, with the written statement in his hand:

—Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say that we planned the whole thing. The truth is we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart.