When was tab made

And I drank Tab. I just wanted to look like everybody else in my high school. Despite — or perhaps because of — my bizarre diet, I lost the weight.

But it made me a lifelong calorie-counter. Even now, I know that 16 dark chocolate chips are 80 calories. I keep 16 chips in a sandwich bag to restrict my chip bingeing. It sometimes even works. It would be nice to think that the exit of Tab at least signals the declining popularity of diet drinks. When it looked like Diet Coke was taking off, I imagine they gave Tab a smaller office and stopped sending it on business trips, but Tab hung in there.

As late as , Coca-Cola still was selling 3 million cases of the stuff. Coca-Cola and Pepsi, finding themselves behind the ball, scrambled to come up with their own diet soda offerings. It wanted to come up with a soda that tasted good, had a proper mouthfeel — sugar adds not only sweetness but also viscosity — and was attractive to women, the presumptive market.

It also needed a catchy name. So an early IBM mainframe computer generated more than candidates with the parameters that the name be three or four letters and not offensive in any foreign language. Tabb, which was eventually shortened to Tab, eventually won the battle of market testing.

Bottlers resisted the product, fearing it would undercut their profitable sugar-based sodas. Later in the s, Coca-Cola introduced the grapefruit-flavored diet soda Fresca, which was a much bigger hit with consumers and further sidelined Tab. Artificial sweeteners were riding high in the s as Americans wanted to enjoy their sweets without paying the caloric price. But danger was lurking in the form of the Delany Clause in the Food Additives Amendment of , which prohibits food additives that have been found to cause cancer.

In , the Food and Drug Administration banned the sweetener cyclamate after lab studies indicated that large doses of the sweetener led to bladder cancer in animals. But the company continued to make Tab because the drink's devoted fans would protest whenever they couldn't find their beloved soda.

Recently, Tab's market share was almost microscopic. While Diet Coke had a 35 percent share of the diet soda market in , Tab's slice of that pie was 0.

Tab isn't alone on the Coca-Cola chopping block. During the pandemic, Coca-Cola already gave the ax to Odwalla and is phasing out Zico coconut water.

New workplaces, new food sources, new medicine--even an entirely new economic system. Coca-Cola has announced that it is discontinuing Tab after 57 years on the market , and fans of the drink will have until the end of December to purchase their last can of nostalgia.

The brand survived initial low sales, the artificial sweetener scares of the s and s, lukewarm enthusiasm for the product at the corporate level and intermittent consumer availability to become—for a brief period—the most popular diet soda in America. Then, of course, Diet Coke came along. While it never regained its lofty status as the top diet soda, loyal Tab fans kept the brand alive. While some might think Tab was the first diet soda, that honor actually belongs to a beverage called No-Cal , which was developed by beverage industry pioneer Hyman Kirsch in Kirsch wanted to create a soda for diabetics and people with cardiovascular problems, so he used cyclamate , which was discovered in by a graduate student working at a University of Illinois chemistry lab after he licked some of the substance and found that it tasted sweet.

But from the start, No-Cal was popular with a different type of consumer: dieters. Canada Dry followed soon after with a line of diet sodas called Glamor, marketing it to women trying to lose weight. Like No-Cal, Diet-Rite initially targeted diabetics and was often placed in the over-the-counter medicine section of grocers. But it soon became clear that the real market was dieters. Coca-Cola and Pepsi, finding themselves behind the ball, scrambled to come up with their own diet soda offerings.

It wanted to come up with a soda that tasted good, had a proper mouthfeel—sugar adds not only sweetness but also viscosity —and was attractive to women, the presumptive market.