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Diet Coke, also known as Coca-Cola Light, is a sugar-free replacement for Coca-Cola. The product was introduced in the United States in July 1982, and was the first new brand since 1886 to use the Coca-Cola wave trademark. The product quickly overtook Tab, Coca-Cola's saccharine-sweetened product, in sales. Unlike Tab, Diet Coke is sweetened with aspartame. On February 7, 2005, the company announced a new variation, Diet Coke Sweetened with Splenda, to be launched in the second quarter of the year. As indicated from the name, the sweetener Splenda (sucralose) will replace aspartame in this formulation.
According to the company's UK website as of 2004:
- Diet Coke is the third-largest brand at the company, and the fourth most-popular carbonated soft drink in the world;
- Diet Coke is sold in 149 countries; in 46 of them, where diet has undesirable connotations, it is known as Coca-Cola Light;
- The top five markets for the brand are the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Brazil.
Diet Coke does not utilize a modified form of the Coca-Cola recipe. It is instead an entirely different formula. The controversial New Coke introduced in 1985 used a version of the Diet Coke recipe that contained sugar and had a slightly different balance of ingredients. In 2004 Coca-Cola introduced Coca-Cola C2 which tastes much closer to Coca Cola but contains half the carbohydrates.
Seeing that Coca-Cola's rival Pepsi was being successful with its sugar-free brand Diet Pepsi, Coca-Cola decided to launch a new sugar-free brand under the Coca-Cola name to compete with Diet Pepsi. With the well-known name, it could be marketed more extensively than the more anonymously dubbed Tab.
Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi have capitalized on the markets of people who require low calorie regimens, such as diabetics and people with other health conditions, athletes, and people who want to lose weight. In the UK, a 330ml can of diet coke contains around 1.3 calories compared to 142 for a regular can of Coca Cola. [1] (http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/nutrition/)
There have been several variants of Diet Coke produced, among them Diet Vanilla Coke, Diet Coke with Lime and Diet Coke with Lemon.
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