Fizz (31 page)

Diet-Rite's new visibility and sales appeal hit the spot with weight-watching Chicagoans, and the following year Royal Crown launched it in stores across America where it was an instant success. Pepsi and Coca-Cola were caught napping. Diet-Rite's national breakthrough made sugar-free soda a big deal. Coke and Pepsi rushed to bring out their own diet drinks. After being warned by its lawyers that calling its sugar-free cola Diet Coca-Cola could undermine the company's valuable trademark, Coke programmed an IBM 1401 computer to spew out a list of 250,000 three- and four-letter words that the company then whittled down to Tab, the diet cola it introduced in April 1963. That same year Pepsi, clearly getting the same advice from its lawyers, launched Patio Diet Cola, only to ignore its lawyers and change the drink's name to Diet Pepsi a year later. Dr Pepper launched Dietetic Dr Pepper before dumping the medical name and opting for Sugar-Free Dr Pepper instead. In 1966 Coke came out with a second diet drink, the citrus-flavored Fresca. Even 7Up, which initially refused point blank to release a diet drink due to its concerns about taste, eventually caved.

In 1965 Americans were drinking ten million pounds of cyclamates and two million pounds of saccharin every year through diet soda, which now accounted for 15 percent of the entire carbonated soft drink market. A liquid reflection of the rise of diet culture, the sugar-free soda boom of the 1960s made the growth of energy drinks in the late 1990s and early 2000s look like nothing more than a ripple in an ocean. Soda, it seemed, was getting healthy, and Royal Crown's Diet-Rite had fended off Coke and Pepsi to remain the leader of the pack.

The rise of the diet sodas shocked the sugar industry. In just three years diet soda had gone from a mere sliver to a chunky wedge of the carbonated soft drinks industry, drawing people away from sugar and toward artificial sweeteners. Soda was big, big business for the sugar producers, and the trend worried them. Artificial sweeteners were cheaper than sugar and less prone to supply shortages, so the soda companies stood to make more money from selling diet drinks than their regular sugar-based fizz. What, the sugar industry wondered, if the growth of diet beverages didn't stop? What if sugared soda became the niche and diet soda the norm? Could the future be sugar free? The sugar industry figured that if that was the
future, it'd be damned if it was going to let that happen. As John Hickson, the vice president of the International Sugar Research Foundation, told the
New York Times
in 1969: “A dollar's worth of sugar could be replaced with a dime's worth of [cyclamate]. If anyone can undersell you nine cents out of 10 you'd better find some brickbat you can throw at him.”

Big Sugar found its brickbat sitting in the law books. Back in 1958 a New York congressman named James Delaney chaired an investigation into the use of chemicals and insecticides in food and drink. The Democratic representative used the probe to introduce an amendment to the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act that was designed to protect the public from dangerous carcinogens. The measure, known as the Delaney Clause, required the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ban the use of chemical additives that had been found “to induce cancer in man, or, after tests, found to induce cancer in animals.”

By the time the diet soda boom took off, the Delaney Clause had already rocked the root beer industry to its very foundations. In December 1960 the FDA ordered safrole, the oil of sassafras, to be removed from all food and drink after it was deemed a carcinogen. Safrole had been a core ingredient of root beer for more than a century and now, suddenly, it was gone, and much of root beer's flavor with it. For a drink that had been losing ground to cola, ginger ale, and lemon-lime sodas for years, this very public cancer scare, coupled with the resulting taste change, smacked root beer even further down from its temperance heyday. Root beer eventually staged a minor recovery in the mid-1960s after developing a process for purging the safrole from its ingredients, but the incident almost killed the drink.

The root beer crisis provided a clear demonstration of the power of the Delaney Clause. The sugar industry reasoned that establishing a link between cyclamates and cancer would be the perfect way to snuff out diet soda. So it flung money at studies of the artificial sweetener in the hope of finding something—anything—it could use to invoke the Delaney Clause. In 1969 the sugar industry's $600,000 investment in cyclamate studies hit pay dirt when scientists at Abbott Laboratories plied rats with the sweetener for eighteen months and reported that the rodents had developed cancerous bladder tumors. Big Sugar had found its silver bullet. That the unfortunate
rats were pumped with so much cyclamate that a human would need to gulp down more than five hundred Frescas a day to consume an equivalent amount didn't matter. The Delaney Clause might have been well meaning but it was ineptly drafted, making no distinction for potency or risk. If a substance could cause cancer even in unrealistically extreme circumstances, that was enough to invoke a ban.

On learning of the test results, the FDA slapped a ban on cyclamates effective from October 19, 1969. Britain, Finland, and Sweden followed with bans of their own. The resulting cancer scare destroyed the diet soda boom. Coke, Pepsi, Royal Crown, and others were quick to reformulate their diet drinks with less tasty saccharin or a more calorific sugar-saccharin mix, but the damage had been done. Before the ban, diet soda accounted for 19 percent of fizzy drink sales in America. In the wake of the cyclamate ban, diet soda's share of the business collapsed to just 3 percent. Royal Crown watched sales of its Coke- and Pepsi-beating diet drink evaporate.

Subsequent studies would clear cyclamates of their cancer connection, and it remains in use in some parts of the world, but in America the sweetener that sparked the creation of diet soda was gone. The cyclamate ban was just the first hit. In early 1970 another study funded by the Sugar Research Foundation came out, this time linking saccharin to bladder tumors in rats, raising the prospect of a ban of the last remaining artificial sweetener approved for use in food and drink. Again the tests involved rats consuming saccharin at levels that would be equivalent to a human guzzling their way through eight hundred diet sodas a day, but the Delaney Clause didn't deal in gray: substances either caused cancer or they didn't in its world.

Panicked by the prospect of a ban that would effectively abolish diet soda altogether, Coca-Cola chief executive Paul Austin wrote to Robert Finch, the US secretary of health, education and welfare, in April 1970 to plead with him not to ban saccharin. “Action affecting the use of saccharin along the lines of that taken with respect to cyclamate will have implications for this industry far exceeding those which accompanied the cyclamate ban,” wrote Austin. “Consumers also have a vital interest in the continued availability of artificially sweetened soft drinks. To deprive diabetics or those with a need to control their caloric intake of a supply
of refreshing beverages in the absence of scientifically compelling reasons would be highly prejudicial to that consumer interest.”

Finch was sympathetic—he felt the Delaney Clause was too extreme and harbored doubts about whether cyclamates should have been banned— but the law was the law. So he engineered a compromise: saccharin would remain on the market but the levels of the sweetener in any product would be restricted and diet soda would need to carry the warning: “Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.”

The soda industry's fight to save saccharin continued throughout the 1970s. The Sugar Research Foundation continued to bankroll studies linking it to cancer while the beverage industry managed to get Congress to keep delaying the imposition of a ban while it waited for aspartame, a new artificial sweetener, to get approval for human consumption, which it finally got in 1981. The fight over saccharin eventually ended in 2000 when it was discovered that it caused cancer in rats due to a toxicological mechanism that didn't exist in humans. With this finding and a lack of conclusive evidence that saccharin caused cancer in humans, the restrictions were lifted and the warning labels introduced in the early 1970s were finally removed. By then the impractical Delaney Clause was gone as well, reformed in 1996 so that future bans would depend on the level of risk posed by a carcinogen rather than its mere presence.

By the time the sugar producers began their assault on saccharin, however, soda had another enemy. At 1:30
PM
on April 22, 1970, a group of hippies and students gathered at Atlanta's Piedmont Park to mark the first ever Earth Day. They had come together at the urging of the
Great Speckled Bird,
the city's weekly countercultural newspaper, and their target was Coca-Cola. In the weeks leading up to the protest, the radical newspaper had called on “ecology freaks, fed up with litter and mountains of undegradable solid waste” to bring empty cans and bottles of Coke, Fresca, Tab, Sprite, and Fanta with them to dump outside the beverage giant's headquarters. “Bring more than you can carry,” the paper told its twenty-two thousand readers. “Bring the trash home to the people who make it.” After loading a pickup with piles of branded flotsam and jetsam, the protestors took their
convoy of garbage through the streets of Atlanta. After a three-mile trek to the Coca-Cola headquarters on North Avenue they dumped the mounds of bottles and cans outside the entrance and, having displayed their displeasure at the company's throwaway containers, walked away, leaving Coke to clean up the mess.

The following year a tiny group of green activists in London called Friends of the Earth did the same to Schweppes, after the company announced that it would only sell its drinks in throwaway bottles in future. The activists spent weeks gathering up empty Schweppes bottles only to find, as the second Earth Day approached, that they were still short of the target of two thousand bottles that they had set for their “Many Happy Returns” stunt. “We had about a week to go and simply couldn't find enough of the damn things, or couldn't find enough hours in the day to collect them,” Pete Wilkinson, the activist charged by the group's leader Graham Searle with collecting the bottles, recalled in Robert Lamb's book
Promising the Earth.
“We had to go out and buy loads of Schweppes drinks, which we promptly poured into plastic containers. Graham produced a lot of gin and we drank it with tonic in order to justify our purchase.”

On Earth Day 1971 the badly hungover environmentalists drove their collection of two thousand bottles to the headquarters of Schweppes in Uxbridge and dumped them at the entrance in front of a gaggle of newspaper reporters and photographers. The stunt made the group famous, turning it into one of the leading environmental campaign groups in Britain. “Nonreturnable bottles were a step toward the ‘out of sight, out of mind' culture we now have and dumping the bottles really helped raise the issue up the agenda in Britain and launch us,” says Neil Verlander, spokesperson for Friends of the Earth. “But ultimately Schweppes went ahead anyway.”

The green movement was too late. The battle over returnable bottles and cans had already been won, and the supermarkets were the winners. Back in 1947 every bottle of fizzy pop in America was returnable, but in the 1950s the soda industry found itself under pressure from all sides to move away from returns and to adopt throwaway cans and bottles. The success of beer sold in cans and nonreturnable bottles had demonstrated that many consumers were happy to pay a bit more for the convenience of
being able to dump the container rather than return it. The canning industry was doing its very best to persuade soda companies to adopt disposable cans. Glassmakers were also keen on throwaway bottles, knowing that a move to nonreturnable bottles would boost their sales. The US military wanted canned soda too. For years US Army bases had been dealing with returnable bottles, but in 1956 the sprawling Fort Greely base in Alaska decided it was tired of losing warehouse space to empty containers that were awkward to stack and left behind broken glass. It announced it was only going to take soda in cans. Keen not to lose the base's business, the local 7Up, Canada Dry, and Coca-Cola bottler obliged and set up a canning plant. Other US military bases followed Fort Greely's example, switching to a can-only policy to reap the benefits of more durable, easier to stack, and disposable containers that were also lighter and faster to cool.

But the strongest pressure of all came from retail and, in particular, the new and increasingly influential supermarkets. Supermarkets didn't want returnable bottles and the hassle of processing deposits and collecting empties. They wanted convenience—one-way containers that shoppers could buy and throw away. To underline the point, supermarkets launched their own sodas in cans and nonreturnable bottles that ate into the sales of established soda brands. As the 1960s began, the tipping point came and the soda industry finally embraced throwaway packaging. By 1965 12 percent of soda sold in America came in disposable containers and by 1970 non-returnable packaging accounted for 40 percent of the market and an estimated 5 percent of the nation's solid waste. Coca-Cola held out the longest. Even in June 1967 the company was debating how it should respond to the rise of throwaway packaging. “There is a definite feeling on the part of the food chains that soft drinks in returnable bottles are unprofitable, and are stocked only because of consumer demand,” Coca-Cola executive Eugene Smith wrote in an internal memo. “We must determine what our overall attitude is to be—stay out of the fastest growing market (convenience packages) or get in with the idea of continuing to dominate every part of the soft drink market. Do you perform in the main arena, or do you become a speciality drink?”

Coca-Cola opted for the main arena. In March 1970, a few weeks before the Earth Day protestors dumped their trash outside its headquarters, the company's chief executive Paul Austin admitted that returnable bottles were on their way out in a speech to a group of Atlanta bankers: “Even though it's far more economical for consumers to buy our products in these returnable packages, some of our dealers—supermarkets and convenience stores—find it more desirable to handle one-way bottles and cans.” The environmental movement's objections to soda waste would only grow as glass gave way to plastic bottles formed from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, a synthetic fiber that not only offered the durability and lightness of cans but was cheaper to make and could be recycled into other products including bags and pants.