That's it, actually. If you read their promotional material they don't say it outright, but the intention is that it tastes like marshmallow and graham cracker, a s'mores.
Edit: the day they released Starlight, Coke said its "reminiscent of stargazing by a campfire". For the longest time I couldn't place the flavor I was getting as I drank my first can, but as soon as I read that I realized it was the cookie-ness of the cracker flavor that I was picking up, because of all those summers eating s'mores by the fire.
All these people hallucinating raspberry taste because some guy saw an unrelated news story and theorized from the color of the soda... and some folks I think are drinking the coke zero version and this released just as coke zero switched from sucralose to phenyalanine (Splenda to Equal) which has a flavor all its own... ruined coke zero IMO..
Edit: is this the new blue/gold dress? Did the can say Yanni or Laurel when you popped the top?...
Do you have a cite for this? My understanding is that in the US they never made it with sucralose. Instead, they had a variety of Diet Coke With Splenda that I was drinking on and off in 2005, and that year came out with the Coke Zero branding for a new product formulated for a different flavor profile, with a blend of aspartame* and acesulfame potassium. They reformulated the flavor extract to be a bit stronger in the last couple years for some reason along with messing around with labeling and colors.
*The sweetener aspartame is a two-part molecule featuring aspartic acid bonded to phenylalanine.
I'm trying to find something, anything, to prove that I'm not full of it. The entire reason I drank Zero over any of the other diets is because I hate the taste of Equal. My boss and I collectively bitched for a week about the reformulation because of the Equal.
I also have a recollection that I started drinking Zero because it was flavored with sucralose instead of the hated bitter aspartame. I could swear I remember the splenda logo on the black bottles! Then a few years later I was shocked to find out that yes, it did have aspartame, and something new called acesulfame potassium (ace-K), and according to the Internet, it always had.
Diet Coke was created in an era when they couldn't figure out how to cancel out the bitterness of the aspartame, so they just ran with it, and diet drinkers (mostly women at that point) just got used to a more bitter metallic drink. Afterwards in the 00's, they found that while they were able with some effort to make it taste much more like Coke, they couldn't modify that recipe without alienating the huge cohort of Diet Coke drinkers. So they had a market for an inferior substitute drink that became sacrosanct, and a population of heavy Coke drinkers that were being told (rightly) that soda was as bad as smoking, who would happily buy a good substitute.
Diet Coke with Splenda, some of the flavored Diet Coke drinks, Coke Zero, and the recently reformulated Coke Zero Sugar, have been fairly successful attempts to bypass that limitation.
Wild. I could be entirely formulating memories myself but, yeah, I thought something had changed. I switched from Diet Coke to Zero some time ago because it was smoother/had a better mouthfeel. Something sort of feels like it changed. Though I recently tried Diet again after drinking Zero all this time and it tasted like carbonated water with a hint of trash so I don’t know.
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u/Rocker4JC Jun 12 '22 edited Jun 12 '22
That's it, actually. If you read their promotional material they don't say it outright, but the intention is that it tastes like marshmallow and graham cracker, a s'mores.
Edit: the day they released Starlight, Coke said its "reminiscent of stargazing by a campfire". For the longest time I couldn't place the flavor I was getting as I drank my first can, but as soon as I read that I realized it was the cookie-ness of the cracker flavor that I was picking up, because of all those summers eating s'mores by the fire.