Tab: A Brief History Of Coca-Cola's First Diet Soda

COCA-COLA turns 138 years old today. While we’ve delved into the history of the drink itself in the past, and the sequence of events that led to its creation at the hands of chemist and drugstore owner John S Pemberton, we’re taking a slight detour here and looking at the origin story of another drink made popular by the Coca-Cola company: Tab. 

Tab was the Coca-Cola company’s original diet soda brand. The brand survived initial low sales, the artificial sweetener scares of the 1960s and 1970s, lukewarm enthusiasm for the product at the corporate level and intermittent consumer availability to become — for a brief period — the most popular diet soda in the US. Then, of course, Diet Coke came along.

ALSO READ | An Energy Drink That Was Actually Radioactive

While some might think Tab was the first diet soda, that honour actually belongs to a beverage called No-Cal, which was developed by beverage industry pioneer Hyman Kirsch in 1952. Kirsch wanted to create a soda for diabetics and people with cardiovascular problems, so he used cyclamate, which was discovered in 1937 by a graduate student working at a University of Illinois chemistry lab after he licked some of the substance and found that it tasted sweet. About 30 times sweeter than sugar, cyclamate isn’t metabolised, making it ideal for people who need to avoid sugar.

But from the start, No-Cal was popular with a different type of consumer: dieters. Actress Kim Novak became the brand’s slim celebrity spokesperson. Canada Dry followed soon after with a line of diet sodas called Glamor, marketing it to women trying to lose weight.

Diet soda really took off with the introduction of Diet-Rite Cola by the Royal Crown Cola company in 1958. Like No-Cal, Diet-Rite initially targeted diabetics and was often placed in the over-the-counter medicine section of grocers. But it soon became clear that the real market was dieters. By 1960, Diet-Rite was the fourth-best-selling soft drink in the country, trailing only Coca-Cola, Pepsi and 7 Up. Coca-Cola and Pepsi thus, finding themselves behind the ball, scrambled to come up with their own diet soda offerings.

Coca-Cola’s foray into the diet cola market – dubbed Project Alpha – was an ambitious one. It wanted to come up with a soda that tasted good, had a proper mouthfeel – sugar adds not only sweetness but also viscosity – and was attractive to women, the presumptive market. It also needed a catchy name.

For the name, Coke executives had one directive: Even though its taste was engineered to mimic Coke’s, it couldn’t be called Diet Coke. Because most early diet sodas didn’t taste that great, strategists warned against associating their brands with drinks that might taint their tremendous value.

So an early IBM mainframe computer generated more than 600 candidates with the parameters that the name be three or four letters and not offensive in any foreign language. Tabb, which was eventually shortened to Tab, eventually won the battle of market testing. Stylised as “TaB,” it was introduced to the world in a series of ads with the tagline “How can just one calorie taste so good?”

For a company that ordinarily excels in marketing, Coca-Cola wasn’t sure how to fit Tab into its portfolio. Bottlers resisted the product, fearing it would undercut their profitable sugar-based sodas. By the end of its first year, it had only 10 percent of the diet soda market, an unusual predicament for a brand backed by the No. 1 soda company in the world. Later in the 1960s, Coca-Cola introduced the grapefruit-flavoured diet soda Fresca, which was a much bigger hit with consumers and further sidelined Tab.

Artificial sweeteners were riding high in the 1960s as Americans wanted to enjoy their sweets without paying the caloric price. But in 1969, the Food and Drug Administration banned the sweetener cyclamate after lab studies indicated that large doses of the sweetener led to bladder cancer in animals. While Tab contained two artificial sweeteners — saccharin and cyclamate — cyclamate was the more important of the two. Saccharin is 300 to 400 times sweeter than sugar, but in high concentrations it gives products a bitter, metallic aftertaste. However, when it’s combined with cyclamate, the bitterness goes away.

After the cyclamate ban, Tab was forced to reformulate and ended up deciding to use saccharine as its primary sweetener. Then in a second blow, follow-up research on potential health problems associated with artificial sweeteners focused on saccharin, leading the FDA to require warning labels on products using the sweetener.

Despite these obstacles, Tab still ended up becoming the best-selling diet cola of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1982, Tab was reformulated yet again to include Nutrasweet, also known as aspartame. But Tab drinkers protested the change to the drink’s flavour profile, and the company dropped aspartame from the recipe.

After Pepsi entered the diet cola market with Patio, it rebranded the product as “Diet Pepsi” within a year. Consumers embraced the new drink and a string of celebrity endorsers only enhanced its popularity. This lesson was lost on Coca-Cola, which didn’t bring a diet drink using the Coca-Cola name onto the market until 1982, when it introduced Diet Coke.

Contrary to the company’s original fears, Diet Coke was an immediate hit. Even though the flavour of the new beverage was not a carbon copy of the sugar-sweetened version, customers took to it. And the main victim of Diet Coke was not the original Coke, but Tab. Over the years, Tab’s market share dwindled; by 2019, its sales made up only about 1 percent of the Coca-Cola portfolio.

Jeffrey Miller is associate professor, Hospitality Management, at Colorado State University. This essay originally appeared in The Conversation and has been republished here under the Creative Commons Licence.