Originally Posted by Jim.

No I mean even people like my parents. They probably don't care. Like at all.

Yeah, so true my Dad enjoys soda pop but he thinks I'm goofy
for getting so crazy over cane sweetened soda pop. LOL To him sweet is sweet. LMAO

I recently brought up the Pepsi and Dew throwbacks to some of my friends, and their reaction was pretty much "um, okay". But as for me, I'll be all over these!

FYI:

In his book about the Cola Wars in the 1980s, Former Pepsi president and later CEO Roger Enrico talked about Pepsi's decision to change to HFCS. There's about 2 or 3 pages in the book about it, actually. What it boiled down to was both Coke and Pepsi transitioned over time, first a mixture of HFCS and sugar then totally switching to HFCS. Coke did it first, starting the process around 1980. Pepsi wouldn't though, because the quality of HFCS at the time messed up the taste too much. Coke's formula apparantly was more forgiving when mixed with corn sludge than Pepsi.... and then-current-Pepsi-CEO Don Kendall could taste the difference, and he wasn't about to mess with the Pepsi "crown jewels" in that manner. However, Pepsi did put pressure on the corn industry to come up with a better product, which apparantly they did. The final blow for Pepsi switching to sugar was the fact that Coke was saving millions of dollars a year by then, by using corn sweetener, money that was going into the marketing side of the Cola Wars, trying to catch up to Pepsi's lead in supermarkets, and putting Pepsi at a big disadvantage. Pepsi stood to gain like $120 million a year in 1983 just by switching to 50% HFCS....

During 1980, Coke went to 50/50% mix HFCS/sugar. In 1983, Pepsi went to a 50/50 mix. At that time, Coke changed their fountain mix from 50/50 to 75/25 corn/sugar. A year later, they went 75/25 in cans/bottles and 100% corn sludge in fountains. That's as far as the book says (book was written in 1986) so I'm not sure when they both went to 100% corn sweetener.

Anyway, I agree that a lot of people probably don't care about the sweetener as long as it's "sweet". But I know that I could definately tell a difference back when I was buying returnables from the last two Pepsi bottlers in the US - Davenport Iowa and Memphis Missouri - the former used sugar and the latter used HFCS. The sugar sweetened stuff was much much better. At the time I don't believe I knew Davenport used sugar, as the caps said "and/or" on them, I only learned that after I joined this board. But I did know there was a decidedly noticable difference in taste.

-Andy