The Death of a Friend. TaB Soda (1963-2020)

 “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” - Steve Jobs talking to Pepsi executive, John Scully.

Soda doesn't get much respect.  Imagine being a soda, that has been on life support for over thirty years. That is been the fragile life of TaB Soda. For decades it has been awaiting the ax.  It finally happened on October 16, 2020. The Coca Cola company axed it along with some other underperforming brands, Although it was not a customer-friendly move, it was understandable, if only because the company would have been justified in killing it long ago, but didn't because they knew there were many devoted fans of the pink can.

 

What made TaB Special was that it was not too sweet.  Many sodas are almost unnaturally sweet,  but TaB wasn't. When it started in 1963, they used sodium cyclamate to sweeten it, which was later changed to saccharine, and finally, the sweetener was changed to a  saccharine/aspartame mixture in 1984.  I was actually a fan of the third formula.    It was for me an improvement over just using saccharine. But many people especially women,  were fans of the less sweet original version as well, after having drunk it for decades. Some folks just didn't like the artificial taste of Diet Coke, which tasted like an aspartame bomb had blown up inside a can.  

However, by 1984 the end was already preordained, TaB had begun its slow market decline. It's had been superseded in the marketplace by  Diet Coke which when introduced in 1982 in the most successful soda product launch of all time. Diet Coke quickly became the third most successful soda brand in the USA, and it competes with regular Pepsi for the second spot.  Tab's market share took a quick plunge in the 1980s, but it remained enough of a seller to avoid cancellation for decades. But it always faced dwindling market places.  TaB was removed from soda fountains,  stopped being sold in international markets, and eventually, 2-liter bottle versions and 16-ounce versions were discontinued leaving only the pink can.   TaB sales were down to 3 million cases by 2010, and a million cases or less by the time it was killed. Towards the end,  it was removed from entire United States bottling regions. It was finally killed when a  can shortage caused by the Covid19 pandemic made lesser soda brands problematic. Soda companies sometimes keep brands in their portfolio in dormancy to be brought back later, but any future plans for a return of Tab are not clear.

For me, it was a friend, something to look forward to every week, to see if it was on sale, or if it could be found.  Others as well were similarly devoted, by increasingly smaller numbers.

 

Goodbye, Dear friend!

1979 TaB TV commericial.