Diet Pepsi drinkers are not happy at all. The taste of Diet Pepsi has changed, and Twitter and Facebook have been inundated with negative comments, such as “Yuck” and “undrinkable,” to name a few. A Twitter comment reads, “Pepsi Next = Pepsi Yuck! They took the worst part of regular Pepsi and diet Pepsi and created an undrinkable disaster.”
“It has a nasty aftertaste, and it’s sickly sweet. You have to wash it out with water,” said David Zimdars, a resident of Ann Arbor, Michigan who has drank Diet Pepsi for the last 30 years. The research scientist says he swears he is switching to Diet Coke when his stash of the old Diet Pepsi runs out in about two months.
PepsiCo switched artificial sweeteners in its Diet Pepsi in August because of consumer complaints about aspartame, and the sweetener’s being linked to everything from autism to cancer. But now, complaints about the sickeningly sweet taste of sucralose are far outnumbering the complaints about aspartame by about six-to-one, says the Consumerist.
PepsiCo Chief Executive Indra Nooyi says it’s too early to tell how consumers are responding. With sales of soda products lagging in the industry, it will be several months before the company can determine if the move has been successful. “Our belief is that you’ve got to wait a few cycles to see what the purchase repeat adoption cycle is,” Ms. Nooyi told analysts on an earnings call Tuesday. Sales of PepsiCo’s diet cola were down 6.5 percent over the previous year.
