Made a huge mistake a couple of weeks ago while in London...went into Benjy's for a sandwich and grabbed a silver can diet coke or so I thought. Went to eat the sandwich and took one swig of the diet coke and something was terribly wrong. Took a look at the can and it said Coca Cola Light. Ugh, the most disgusting thing I ever had the misfortune to drink.

Please nobody tell me diet coke and coke light are the same drink with different labeling. The diet coke I drink in London tastes identical to the diet coke I drink in NY. But coke light I drink in Paris is disgusting as this was.

Any way I looked closely at the can and saw a sticker had been placed over the ingredients part. When I took the sticker off I saw strange looking letters almost like an Indian script so obviously this drink is being imported from a long way and of course diet sodas deteriorate very quickly due to improper storage. Went back to the store and looked at the red coke cans and sure enough there were stickers over the ingredients and taking one off same strange looking alphabet.

Two things...why are the stores pulling this garbage and you should be aware in London that if you see any cans that say Coca Cola Light the coke products in that store are not the ones they are supposed to be selling.

Maybe, maybe not. I would think that Coke of the UK would be policing this. I can't believe ALL Coca-Cola Light in the UK is suspect. Something IS up here, though. And Coca-Cola Light is not the same formula as Diet Coke (which is not sold in the UK) anywho...

Anyone have more?

Trust me all Coke Light sold in the UK is not made by the official UK supplier but imported from long distances; just look at the cans.

Of course, the UK government might think there are more important things to worry about.

And just to clarify your post a bit, diet coke sold in the UK uses the same exact formula as diet coke sold in the US while coke light is not made in the UK at all.

I would think the official Coke supplier would be the one to be the most upset about this...unless it is being done by them....

i went to london and came back with coke bottles from 12 different european and asian countries. even one from morocco.

it's called the "grey market," and it's similar to how, in America, Coke ships around product to different states. Since Europe is so small and tiny and what not, but they all (used to) have different currencies, with different exchange rates, the cost of 20 pallets of coke was different country to country.

therefore, indian and arab shop keepers import it, usually from out of europe, now that they are pretty much all in the european union.

there was a scandal a few years ago involving contaminated product (there was mold on the cans) and an outbreak of sickness at a russian school. the fear arose that they couldn't trace all the product because of how it gets privately shipped.

Well at least it's easy to see this is happening with coca cola light...but the coke cans have labels hiding the true origins of the drink and I would be very leeary, quite frankly, of buying and drinking such products imported from such long distances under god only knows what conditions.

And a small aside...most in the UK do not drink beverages over ice, but much nearer to room temperature than Americans prefer.

I can just imagine how Coke Zero would go over there. I don't even want to think of drinking this stuff warm. Ickarooney.

LOL
The firs 12oz bottle I drank was ok but it had a sweet sort of taste that I was not use to.

The second bottle I poured over ice and was like the Love Boat. LOL Ice it is. LOL

[ 06-12-2005, 11:04 AM: Message edited by: Mr Zabe ]

Or maybe it's because it's an old can, when you drink a Coke or a Coke light (or diet) 2 months, 3 months or a year after the date that appears in the can or the bottle, it tastes awful. I remember that I drank an old Coca-Cola Light that kept in the office for a year, and the taste was horrible.

Aspartame breaks down because of either heat or age or both. Just a single day in the hot sun is enough to make most diet sodas taste like Alka Seltzer. Good reason not to buy twelve packs of soda from service stations that store pop outside. No thanks.