The beverage aisle is missing Tab these days

Gone but not forgotten. The diet soda Tab lived 57 years before the last drop was bottled in 2020. Tab’s memories as the drink “of and for beautiful people,” will linger long. 

Tab’s television commercials featured supermodels Elle Macpherson and Jayne Kennedy as well as the “video vixen” – Donna Rupert. Even the Tab-labeled drinking glass was magically transformed and given an “hour-glass figure.”

 

Dieting teenage girls, like Celia, who said her dress size was a “double-digit chubbette,” drank one-calorie Tab in order to “keep tabs” on their weight. 

“I wasn’t terribly overweight, but when you are under 5 feet tall, it doesn’t take a lot of extra pounds to look, well, extra round,” wrote Celia Viggo Wexler, a nonfiction author and journalist. 

“Tab was very, very sweet, with the aftertaste of furniture polish. It went very well with the maraschino cherries I consumed to distract me from not eating desserts,” Wexler added. 

Introduced by The Coca-Cola Company in 1963, Tab contained no sugar. Contrary to popular belief, the name was not an acronym for “totally artificial beverage” or “tastes awfully bad.” 

Even though Tab was engineered to mimic Coke’s flavor, management avoided giving the new product a Coca-Cola identity, according to Dr. Jeffrey Miller, an associate professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. 

“Because most early diet sodas didn’t taste that great, strategists warned against associating their brands with drinks that might taint their tremendous value,” Dr. Miller said. 

Royal Crown Cola set the example when it launched Diet-Rite Cola in 1958. By 1960, Diet-Rite was the fourth best-selling soft drink in the country, trailing only Coca-Cola, Pepsi and 7 Up. 

“Coca-Cola and Pepsi, finding themselves behind the eight ball, scrambled to come up with their own diet soda offerings,” Dr. Miller said. 

“Coca-Cola wanted to come up with a soda that had a proper ‘mouthfeel’…and was attractive to women, the presumptive market. It also needed a catchy name,” Dr. Miller remarked. 

Coke’s marketing research department used its giant IBM computer to generate a list of short words with one vowel that were “G-Rated.” There were more than 185,000 options, including “Burp.” The word “Tabb” won the judges’ hearts and minds. It was later slimmed down to “Tab.” 

Tab probably should have been “retired” when Coca-Cola rolled out diet Coke in 1982. Yet, The Coca-Cola Company continued to produce Tab for nearly four more decades, even though its market share dwindled to a trickle. 

Perhaps the company learned a lesson about “customer loyalty” from the “New Coke” debacle in 1985 – when Coke was reformulated to taste like Pepsi…a 79-day blunder. 

“But there are also consequences to keeping old favorites alive,” wrote Danielle Wiener-Bronner of CNN Business. She interviewed Coca-Cola’s CEO James Quincey in December 2021, about a year after Tab was discontinued. He explained: 

“In the end, it’s a Darwinian struggle for space in the supermarket or in the convenience store. The retailer wants to make as many dollars as he or she can for each spot on the shelf.” An underperforming brand, like Tab, takes away precious shelf space and “eventually it will get pulled out.” 

Natalie Kueneman of Ketchum, Idaho, who created ILoveTab.com in 1994, said she was saddened but not shocked by “Coca-Cola’s decision to pull the plug on Tab, especially since the company hadn’t substantially marketed the drink in more than two decades.” 

Kueneman said: “Coke missed a huge opportunity to market Tab in a really fun way over the years. I don’t know why they never did.”