Tonight I caved and bought a six-pack of Coca-Cola Life. What is Coca-Cola Life, you ask? As far as I can tell, it’s a transparent attempt to get Coke product into Whole Foods. Do the checklist: HFCS replaced with cane sugar? Check. Aspartame and ace-K and sucralose replaced with stevia extract? Check. Glass bottles instead of PET plastic or aluminum? Check. 8 ounce containers with green labels? Check. There’s nothing in here that couldn’t go on the shelf at Whole Paycheck, and that is as significant a development as the revelation that Diet Coke with Splenda only existed because Wal-Mart wanted a Splenda-based diet soda to market.
So…the great shift to organic purity has finally hit the biggest soft drink in the world. How does it TASTE though?
To be honest? It’s a little strange. The mouthfeel is almost hollowed-out, sort of: this is a blend of sugar and stevia and the actual sugar content is reduced by more than a third from standard Coke (and slightly more relative to the glass-bottle Mexican Coke that is indispensable to life in California). In a way, it’s a recreation of C2, the abortive reduced-calorie offering from a decade ago, which used HFCS and various diet blends to halve the caloric contents while still maintaining more or less the classic Coke taste.
I took the liberty of testing it out on the wife, who is genetically sensitive to bitter flavors and as a result eschews all artificial sweeteners. She could still taste the stevia bitterness, but much diminished, and allowed that given the option she would take this over Diet Coke or Coke Zero. So that’s a step in the right direction. I’d be happy to keep it around myself, just because an 8 ounce shot is a lot closer to the classic 6.5 ounce “nickel Coke” of the 20th century. Even if this one costs closer to a dollar than a nickel. Portion control is easy when they do it for you for a fee.
It’s going to be an interesting experiment. Can the Coca-Cola corporation move their flagship beverage in a healthier direction? Will the market force them to? Will anyone but annoying affluent white people glom onto this? Is there an audience beyond people like myself who are just a bitch for any form of soda marketing? Ask me later, I’m finishing this six-pack.