Diet Coke sales beat Classic Coca-Cola

According to sales data, published by IRI, in the week ending May 19 2018, Diet Coke sales were higher than Classic Coca-Cola by over £2 million! You can read more here.

Coke decided to keep their products the same. Which is in contrast to many other soft drink manufacturers who reformulated their products, reducing sugar and in many cases adding artificial sweeteners, when the SDIL was announced.

As a result of the widespread reformulation, the revenue from the levy is expected to be far lower than was originally predicted. This is concerning since the revenue was going to be used to fund school sports and other health promoting activities.

Anyway, back to Coke, instead of reformulating, Coke made a big marketing push for diet Coke. Soon after this push, sales of Diet Coke exceeded Classic Coca-Cola. Of course it is not possible to say that the marketing push caused the increased sales of the diet drink, since other factors such as increased awareness of the impacts of sugar on health may have played a part.

Not only did the decision not to reformulate reduce research and development costs, it also helped Coke to avoid the public outcry about changing tastes of their favorite drinks, and concerns over increases of artificial sweeteners. However not reformulating did mean that their Classic Coca-Colas were subject to increased costs from the levy. Which is perhaps why Coke decided to reduce the size of standard drinks- in order to reduce impacts on profits.

It will be interesting to see how other companies have fared since the SDIL was implemented. Soft drink manufacturers eligible for the SDIL, of which there are about 300, have to submit their returns at the end of this month (July 30th).