Good Bye, Big Cola
My mission to stop contributing to the American economy continues.
This time I’m closing my wallet for the soft drink behemoths The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo, and their Coca-Cola and Pepsi brands. I don’t drink a lot of soft drinks, but I occasionally take a sip of a Coca-Cola or Pepsi bottle. Now, because of the current reign of President Donald, those days are over, and the big questions that needs to be answered is:
Are there any good alternatives to Coca-Cola and Pepsi?
There are no other international cola flavoured brands other than Coca-Cola and Pepsi available in Norway, but there are a surprisingly huge number of Norwegian brands. To find my cola replacement, I purchased no less than 7 different brands and formulas. Some from the same manufacturer, but I tested both their sugar and sugar free version. And to make sure I was not influenced by previous knowledge of any of the soft drinks, I went for a blinded experiment.
But the experiment is far from scientifically sane.
It was conducted over a time period of a little less than three days, meaning that soft drink containers had been unsealed for around 65 hours in total. They have of course been closed, but some of the carbonation has managed to escape the containers. The bottles have also been in and out of the fridge quite a few times. This means that all the soft drinks have been through a bit of a change, and have been served at different temperatures. But in my case, this is actually realistic. If I open a large bottle of, typically 1,5 liters, it will usually take days before I’ve emptied it.
The results are available blow. Unfortunately, the table format here is absolutely terrible, sorry about that. You’ve got to scroll horizontally to see all the results. The taste of each soft drink is scored from 0 to 10, 0 being the lowest score, and 10 being the highest. A 🆓 means that the particular soft drink is sugar free.
| Test # | Xtra Cola | Xtra Cola Uten Sukker🆓 | Cola | Cola Uten Sukker🆓 | Cola Klassisk | Cola X Uten Sukker🆓 | Prima Lavpris Cola Sukkerfri🆓 | Pepsi | Pepsi Max🆓 | Coca‑Cola Original Taste | Coca‑Cola Zero Sugar🆓 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 5 | 3 | 0 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 2 |
| 2 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 2 |
| 3 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 5 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| Avg. score | 2,4 | 2,2 | 3,2 | 2,6 | 4,0 | 2,6 | 1,0 | 4,8 | 2,6 | 2,6 | 1,6 |
Observations
- The astute reader will notice that I’ve included the cursed American brands. I did this to see if I’m actually missing out on anything.
- Some of the scores fluctuates like crazy, from between 5 and 0 for the same flavor in some cases. Why? I don’t know.
- Highest score was 5, average score across the board is 2,7.
- With the highest score given being 5 out of a maximum score of 10, it’s obvious that I don’t actually like cola flavored soft drinks.
- The lowest scoring one, Prima Lavpris Cola Sukkerfri, is the one I though I preferred before the test.
- Pepsi has the highest average score of 4,8. That’s a shame.
- Pepsi Max and Coca-Cola Original Taste got exactly the same average score 2,6.
Conclusion
If we disregard the Pepsi result, and we have to because not drinking Coca-Cola and Pepsi is the whole point of this exercise, the winner is Cola Klassisk with an average score of 4,0. Second place goes to Cola1 at 3,2, and the rest of the flavours tail behind well below 3,0.
The average score for all the flavors is 2,7. The obvious conclusion is that there is no real reason for me to drink cola flavoured soft drinks. In fact, I haven’t had one since this little experiment was conducted, which I think was at least two months ago.
In October last year, I got the energy drink monkey off my back, maybe I can do the same thing with cola flavoured soft drinks? Or even soft drinks in general?
Sound like a challenge!
What an imaginative name! ↩︎
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