They might also have found that people just want sugar water. A lot of mass market food products get bastardized by being made blander and more sugary.
They didn't actually use the original formula. They used the opportunity to switch from Cane sugar to Corn Syrup. Since people didn't have the ability to taste the difference any more, no one noticed. This let them cut the cost of a major ingredient which then translated into profit. They gained a LOT more from the failed product.
That’s actually something I have been thinking about. How do they get so much sugar into a drink? You could never produce something drinkable with this amount of sugar.
Drinks like iced teas or watered down fruit drink or 'vitamin water' around that level were common in australia, but one by one are going from being the less cloyingly sweet options to being the most via other sweeteners. Usually one ariund the 5% sugar range will get extremely popular because it is actually slightly different, then get bought out or price dumped out of existence by coca cola followed by being focuse grouped into being exactly the same as all the others and falling into obscurity.
There's usually one or two items on the muesli/nut/cake bar shelf, but you have to read the nutrition info for half of them every time to find it.
I don't want sweeteners, and yet in some products, my much preferred sugar is replaced by sweeteners, because producers just don't want to have two products. I suppose people who hate sugar are more numerous than people who hate sweeteners, so the artificial product wins. Like sweet-n-sour pickled herring. Delicious. But off-the-shelf, it's spoiled with sweeteners today, instead of good old sugar.
I would also be interested in this. Many soft drink recipes are well-established and rarely adjusted because even small, well-intentioned changes can damage the brand and customer loyalty. Furthermore, it seems counterintuitive that producers would increase sugar content by as much as 1.57 times because that would inherently cost them significantly more money over time.
have you forgotten the context of this thread ? Sugar water! One of the most advertised products of all time is sugar water. A useless product that makes people sick.
From the comment you first replied to: harder to see how sweet something is
It was never about sugar content, but how sweet something is.
Overly sweet things can be unpleasant to an adult palate, or one accustomed to a culture of less sweet things. In simpler times, sugar content was a somewhat reliable metric of sweetness (of course it can be balanced by acid, tannins, salt etc.), so you could select a product without needing to taste it first.
Eh, I remember the days when if I wanted less sugar, I'd just use less sugar, and the word "engineering" and "patenting" wouldn't be right for the food discussion.
As someone who has purchased bags of xylitol and added them to lemonade, tea, etc.:
It's because it tastes bad. Odd that any sugar could taste bad, but it's true. It's not _that_ expensive, but normal sugar is so cheap (not to mention HFCS, which has got to be even cheaper) that price is still a plausible issue. But more likely, the taste preferences of Americans is just so sweet that we can't appreciate xylitol as a sweetener.
I mean, there are actual measurable cases where “sugar was sweeter”: less chemicals, larger sizes, being produced closer to where you buy it and therefore being fresher, and smaller producers who delivered polished well-made product being squeezed out by large multi-national corporations.
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