Soda sales have been declining due to the growing number of health-conscious consumers who are worried about the sugar content in their favorite fizzy beverages. Big companies like Pepsi are now coming up with new drinks that use sugar substitutes, hoping these would appeal to weight-watching customers who still want their classic drinks.
In the past, diet cola products using artificial sweeteners just didn't have the same taste as the original, and so sales began to struggle.
Artificial sweeteners can be made sweeter than regular sugar, all while adding zero calories. But many have been getting a bad rap for their possible links to bladder cancer, brain tumors and other health concerns.
Pepsi hopes that its own natural source of low-calorie sweetness for the new product Pepsi True can boost sales again.
Stevia, Pepsi's alternative sweetener, is a sugar substitute derived from plant leaves, which contain zero calories. It gained favor in the 1970s first in Japan and later in the United States when anti-obesity campaigns began to trend.
However, stevia is not without controversies. The sweetener, as it was used in commercial drinks and food in the past, had a bitter licorice-like, even metallic, aftertaste. Not something one would expect from a natural sweetener.
Stevia leaves on their own are sweet and do not have any unpleasant aftertaste, according to Rich Duprey of The Motley Fool.
As it turns out, the main ingredient in most stevia products is erythritol, which is extracted from plant leaves through a chemical process. Critics suggest that the product should no longer be labeled "natural" if chemicals are involved in its wide-scale commercial use. It is also this chemical process that gives stevia drinks their aftertaste, which many consumers find unpalatable.
But soda manufacturers are still looking to the sweet leaves as the answer to diet beverages that do not use artificial sweeteners like aspartame or saccharin.
Pepsi's new stevia-sweetened beverage, Pepsi True, will be made available on Amazon beginning mid-October. It will contain 30 percent less sugar and, supposedly, no metallic aftertaste. The green cans will be 7.5 ounces each and contain only 60 calories.
But senior beverage analyst at Euromonitor, Jonas Feliciano, begs to differ.
"The fact of the matter is the taste is still not right ... Everyone's trying to clone an original, and they're close. But it doesn't quite cut it with a lot of consumers," he commented on Pepsi's efforts to recreate their original drink using stevia.
Rival soda company, Coca-Cola, also launched their own naturally sweetened diet drink earlier in the year called Coke Life. Coke's 8-ounce green also only contains 60 calories and uses both sugar and stevia as sweeteners.
