Diet Pepsi gets rid of aspartame, but will customers return?

Consumption of soft drinks has been steadily decreasing over the past decade – seen in a 5.2% drop in Diet Pepsi sales last year, something the company has attributed to the drink’s recipe including controversial sweetener aspartame.

“It’s the No. 1 thing that our clients have been calling about”, said Seth Kaufman, a senior VP at PepsiCo. In the non-aspartame sodas, PepsiCo replaced the sweetener with ace-K, or acesulfame-potassium, and sucralose, better known as Splenda.

Critics say it has not been studied enough and may be carcinogenic, affect pregnancy or cause tumours but the US and EU have given it the go-ahead for general use.

There are no plans to drop the controversial sweetener from Diet Pepsi in the UK, with a spokesman saying UK consumers “love Diet Pepsi just as it is today”.

A patched up Eating regimen Pepsi without aspartame is appearing on store racks.

In this Saturday, August 8, 2015 photo, bottles of Diet Pepsi with, left, and without aspartame, center and right, sit in a case at a store in New York. The move comes after PepsiCo surveys showed aspartame (aka Equal and NutraSweet) was the top reason cited by consumers for ditching diet soda. Two years ago, Coca-Cola even tested ads in select newspapers defending the safety of the sweetener.

Indeed, as Pepsi’s North America CEO, Al Carey, says, diet drinks “are a definite drag on the business; And the number one thing we see from consumers is a complaint about aspartame”.

It’s not the first attempt by PepsiCo Inc.to lift flagging sales of Diet Pepsi.

The new health initiative recently introduced by the Obama Administration is pushing for beverage companies (among many others) to remove sugar from their recipes. This weekend, for instance, a store in New York City had the old and new versions side by side.

Aquafina is a bottled water product made by PepsiCo.

Pepsi has been a big player in the Super Bowl commercial world since 1987, and as of 2011 (the most recent available statistics), more than 125 Pepsi beverage products had been advertised during the big game.