40 Years Ago, “New Coke” Had Coca-Cola Fans Fizzing Mad

Karen Wilson petitions against the new Coca-Cola formula. — Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS/VCG via Getty Images

Four decades ago, the Coca-Cola Company made what some called the “marketing blunder of the century,” introducing a new formulation of Coca-Cola soda that became known as New Coke. And even the company itself — in an article on its website — acknowledges that the switch-up sent fans into a revolt.

Forty years after those first fateful cans rolled onto supermarket shelves, here’s everything you didn’t remember about the time the most popular soda in the world decided to change its flavor … and soda drinkers around the world unleashed their wrath.

Why did Coca-Cola make New Coke?

To hear the company tell it, they had plenty of good reasons to change the Coca-Cola recipe: a lethargic cola market, a dip in Coca-Cola consumer awareness and consumer preference, and a slipping share lead over the company’s “chief competitor” (read: PepsiCo).

And Coca-Cola execs also had a good reason to feel confident in the change: According to the company, nearly 200,000 consumers preferred the taste of New Coke over old Coke in taste tests. And so on April 23, 1985, the company announced that it was changing the formula for good. But in the minds of countless Coca-Cola fans, it was not a change for the better.

Coca-Cola’s CEO: “One of the dumbest executives in American business history”

In the ensuing fracas, calls to the Coca-Cola Company consumer hotline tripled as Coke fans complained about the change. Consumers stockpiled the old formula, with one Texas man buying $1,000 worth of the original Coke from a local bottler. People wrote songs about the original taste. Some people even held protests with signs reading “We want the real thing” and “Our children will never know refreshment.”

One person wrote a letter to Roberto Goizueta, then the chairman and chief executive officer of the company, calling him “Chief Dodo” and requesting the autograph of “one of the dumbest executives in American business history.”

New Coke’s reign only lasted 79 days

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Can Museum (@can_museum)

Just 79 days after introducing the new Coke, the Coca-Cola Company announced that the original formula would return as Coca-Cola Classic and be sold alongside the new Coke. The company later sold the new Coke under the name Coke II before pulling it from its beverage lineup forever — or, at least, until it brought back “New Coke” for a limited run as part of a 2019 Stranger Things promotion.

The company viewed New Coke as a success … sort of

At an employee event celebrating the 10th anniversary of New Coke, Goizueta hailed the product as one of the “intelligent risks” that all Coca-Cola employees should be making in their jobs.

“We set out to change the dynamics of sugar colas in the United States, and we did exactly that — albeit not in the way we had planned,” Goizueta said. “The most significant result of ‘New Coke’ by far was that it sent an incredibly powerful signal … a signal that we really were ready to do whatever was necessary to build value for the owners of our business.”

Conspiracy theorists think “New Coke” was just a marketing ploy for the classic Coca-Cola

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Can Museum (@can_museum)

Some people believe the Coca-Cola Company introduced “New Coke” just to increase the original Coca-Cola’s share in the sugar cola market. But the fact-checking website Snopes considers this theory false, asserting that the company’s mistake was prioritizing the new Coke’s taste test results over the original Coke’s legacy.

“The passion for original Coca-Cola — and that is the word for it, passion — was something that caught us by surprise,” Donald Keough, Coca-Cola’s president and COO at the time, once admitted, per Snopes. “It is a wonderful American mystery, a lovely American enigma, and you cannot measure it any more than you can measure love, pride or patriotism.”

Keough added, “Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say that we planned the whole thing. The truth is we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart.”