I prefer Coke, and always taste nonblindly. It's time for some soda science. Some years ago a dentist recommended diet cola, and now I don't think I could enjoy the syrupy sweetness of a regular soda, but I always enjoy a Diet Coke, especially from a fountain. When a franchise only carries PepsiCo products, I'll have a Diet Pepsi, but I've never tasted them side by side. Preregistration details: I'll start with a non-blinded taste test, trying to see if I prefer one drink or the other when I know what they are. At least one day later, I'll try the two covered cans to see which one I prefer and whether I can tell which is which. If I have enough patience to wrap more cans I'll mix them together in the fridge and pick two at random and see if I can identify them by taste. Will report back. related:Pepsi asked consumers to blind-taste-test Pepsi vs. Coke; most preferred Pepsi. But Coke maintains its high market share partly because when people are asked to nonblindly taste Coke and Pepsi (as they always do in the real world) people prefer Coke.
Trial One: non blinded taste test Sipping from the two cans straight from the refrigerator I found the tastes very similar and hard to distinguish. "Maybe Pepsi tastes a little better?" I noted. "Both mainly taste sweet. There's a lemony sourness in the background." "Coke seems to have a bit more of the sour flavor. I want to say Pepsi tastes 'smoother' or is 'more balanced' but I'm not sure what I mean by those words." "If these were the same cola but someone told me they added a little grapefruit juice to one I would think it was the Coke." In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell recounts the drama of the Pepsi Challenge, a pivotal moment in the Cola Wars (my favorite war). In the midst of this upheaval, Pepsi began running television commercials around the country, pitting Coke head-to-head with Pepsi in what they called the Pepsi Challenge. Dedicated Coke drinkers were asked to take a sip from two glasses, one marked Q and one marked M. Which did they prefer? Invariably, they would say M, and, lo and behold, M would be revealed as Pepsi. Coke's initial reaction to the Pepsi Challenge was to dispute its findings. But when they privately conducted blind head-to-head taste tests of their own, they found the same thing: when asked to choose between Coke and Pepsi, the majority of tasters 57 percent - preferred Pepsi. A 57 to 43 percent edge is a lot, particularly in a world where millions of dollars hang on a tenth of a percentage point, and it is not hard to imagine how devastating this news was to Coca-Cola management. The Coca-Cola mystique had always been based on its famous secret formula, unchanged since the earliest days of the company. But here was seemingly incontrovertible evidence that time had passed Coke by. Coca-Cola responded to the challenge with the disastrous New Coke formula, which performed better in blind taste tests. As Gladwell explains, the problem is that when people have just a sip of a drink in a taste test, they prefer a sweeter hit, something to amuse the bouche. But when they buy a case of soda to drink at home, they might prefer a flavor with less sweetness, more "balanced." The two colas have very similar ingredients. Diet Coke CARBONATED WATER CARAMEL COLOR ASPARTAME PHOSPHORIC ACID POTASSIUM BENZOATE (TO PROTECT TASTE) NATURAL FLAVORS CITRIC ACID CAFFEINE Diet Pepsi CARBONATED WATER CARAMEL COLOR ASPARTAME PHOSPHORIC ACID POTASSIUM BENZOATE (PRESERVES FRESHNESS) CAFFEINE CITRIC ACID NATURAL FLAVOR ACESULFAME POTASSIUM The brands have experimented with a number of ways to add vim without adding calories and now use aspartame in the U.S. market. I noticed that my 7.5 fluid ounce (222 mL) can of Diet Pepsi had 22 mg of caffeine; the same size can of Diet Coke had 28 mg. I have little doubt that the drug affects the appeal. I remember being in a restaurant once and noticing that I felt happy, not absurdly happy but somewhat unaccountably happy, and realized I had had a few refills of Diet Coke and was probably cheered up by the drug. Caffeine probably wouldn't affect a quick taste test but might provide positive associations over time. Pepsi One has the highest caffeine content of any cola, lab tested 57 mg per 12-ounce can. Diet Coke has 46 mg, regular Pepsi 39 mg, Diet Pepsi 37 mg, and regular Coca-Cola 34 mg. Trial Two: blinded taste test After struggling to distinguish the two colas when I knew what they were, I knew it would be a challenge drinking from the wrapped cans. After a few sips I thought the can on the Right was "more grapefruity?" I sensed that there was no way I could ever identify one unknown drink by itself, any difference between the two was faint. After a lot of sipping I decided that the Right can was Coke, with confidence of 75% (barely better than a 50% guess). After a while the drinks were not as cold and maybe less fizzy and the Right can started tasting better, the Left can seemed to have more of the sour flavor. I changed my guess to Left = Coke with 60% confidence, which happened to be correct. I conclude that, for me, the two diet colas are completely interchangeable.In the early 1980s, the Coca-Cola Company was profoundly nervous about its future. Once, Coke had been far and away the dominant soft drink in the world. But Pepsi had been steadily chipping away at Coke's lead. In 1972, 18 percent of soft drink users said they drank Coke exclusively, compared with 4 percent who called themselves exclusive Pepsi drinkers. By the early 1980s, Coke had dropped to 12 percent and Pepsi had risen to 11 percent and this despite the fact that Coke was much more widely available than Pepsi and spending at least $100 million more on advertising per year.
I know it's just geeky fun, but consider: 1. Do you think there's a problem with you knowing it's always an A/B choice? That is: do you think the results would be different if you were ever given two same Pepsi? 2. What would happen if you added N cans of M brands? That is, let's say you get 7 extra cans and 2 will be RC Cola and the other ones will be some store brands or whatever. 3. Would it be a good test of caffeine hypothesis to tamper with a number of cans by adding a predetermined caffeine solution? If so, should you only tamper with one brand? 4. Can any of scenarios 1-3 be combined in a way that'd, to say intuitively, add information while reducing noise? Since apparently two is enough to even mention confidence: I bet that if we were playing Russian Roulette, you'd absolutely insist on letting you re-spin when going second despite the difference being noticeably less than 25%.with confidence of 75% (barely better than a 50% guess)
1. If I could distinguish labeled Coke and Pepsi, it would be interesting to pull one or two wrapped cans from the fridge and see if I could identify them. The two were so similar to me I am sure I could not identify a single can, and if I got two of the same soda I wouldn't be sure if they were different. 2. I don't remember what RC Cola tastes like. I tried to find a Tab but was too late. I am pretty happy with an occasional Diet Coke (or Pepsi), and not looking for something better, just curious to see if I should really prefer getting one or the other. 3. I think the caffeine might have a small effect on loyalty over time, but the 27% higher drug content in Diet Coke could be compensated by drinking more Diet Pepsi. I don't think of myself as impressionable to advertising, but I don't have a better explanation for my preference for Coca-Cola than a lifetime of exposure to better marketing. 4. Complicating the experiment seems likely to add both information and noise. The "first trace" of the Russian roulette concept appeared in the 1840 story "The Fatalist" in which a loaded pistol was used to demonstrate predestination (with twenty gold pieces gambled) based on whether it misfired on the first trigger pull. In the 1937 short story "Russian Roulette" "things were cracking up, so that their officers felt that they were not only losing prestige, money, family and country, but were also being dishonored before their colleagues of the Allied armies, some officer would suddenly pull out his revolver, anywhere, at the table, in a café, at a gathering of friends, remove a cartridge from the cylinder, spin the cylinder, snap it back in place, put it to his head and pull the trigger. There were five chances to one that the hammer would set off a live cartridge and blow his brains all over the place. Sometimes it happened, sometimes not." A sergeant survives this version at least seven times, before "he took out five cartridges and left one, reversing the order of chances" and staked two thousand francs (and his life) on the outcome. My preference would be to decline to play. If it is given that I must play, and I will be in second place, should I prefer the variant in which the cylinder is spun only once at the start, or re-spun after each trigger pull? We can model the choice with two rows of six chairs each. In the re-spin row, there is a revolver on each chair with one cartridge in a random unique position. In the one-spin row, five chairs have empty revolvers, and one chair chosen at random has a revolver fully loaded. I can choose between the second chair in the re-spin row or the second chair in the one-spin row. In this perspective it looks like every chair has a 1/6 chance of disaster, so what difference does the choice make? Tradition is that the game is concluded as soon as the revolver fires, so chair #2 in the re-spin row gives a 1/6 chance that I'll not have to participate at all because chair #1 was fatal. If I do have to take my turn, it's a (5/6)(1/6) chance of disaster. With these high stakes, yes, I would pay a lot to improve my chances by 16⅔%.
