tagged 
coca cola, coke, crush big soda, grocery shopping, pepsi, pop in Nutrition
coca cola, coke, crush big soda, grocery shopping, pepsi, pop in Nutrition Campus Improv Eats - Soda Undercover
by, Chris Sinagoga | Thursday, January 10, 2019 at 11:00AM
Chris Sinagoga | Thursday, January 10, 2019 at 11:00AM Food companies make a shiteload of money, and they can pay their employees a shiteload of money. That means they get to hire the top-notch scientists, cooks, and advertisers to make their product look great and taste a way that makes you want to eat more of their product.
Want to be healthy? How bout some tea. Pure Leaf Tea.
While at the grocery store I saw a bottle of this sitting on the shelf:
For the sake of this post, I chose to use the "healthy" kind: unsweetened. The front labels of products always look good (as designed by marketing people that are really good at what they do), but you can really find out more by flipping around to the back. And there was one thing in specific I was looking for: who really made this stuff?
If I recall correctly, the Sweetened Tea had 27g of carbohydrate for 8 oz., which is the same as almost 3 cups of raspberries.
Yup, Pepsi.
What about something as simple as Dasani bottled water?
Coke!
There are tons of articles talking about how Big Soda is corrupting health sciences by funding studies, and CrossFit has seen a major shift of their efforts in recent years to move away from highlighting the CrossFit Games and instead doing eveything they can do drive pop out of the health space. I, personally, try to get the gist of those reports and not get too far down the rabbit hole. I can also see how it would be difficult to trust a "healthy" product, like tea, that has a Pepsi label on it (I do think water is water, though... right?).
Does seeing Coke and Pepsi on labels like this make a difference for you? I'd like to hear your thoughts.
Reader Comments (4)
This started as a product expansion for Big Soda - "Wait, people will buy bottled tap water? We can sell the s*** out of that!" - but my impression is that it will move (if it hasn't already moved) to a hedge for them. Big Soda is under attack for sugary drinks, so if they can hedge their product offering with something that doesn't have sugar, this may serve to buoy revenues at a time when sugary drinks are under fire and many consumers are being more careful with what they put into their bodies.
Personally, I'm against Coke and Pepsi on principle, so I will not buy their water either. Plus, you know, water fountains. The hardest part for me was giving up Gatorade. I had loved that stuff for a long time.
Now - who's gonna talk about the undercover soda (aka juice)?
Juice and milk are next on the list Mel! And Gatorade tastes better than pop in my opinion. Makes me more thirsty after I drink it though
The tea product was developed in the early 90s. The tea is Lipton which is owned by unilever. The reason they partnered with Pepsi was because unilever does not have a bottleing distribution network. Is this really a Pepsi product or a Lipton product bottled and distributed by Pepsi? From reading about it, it looks like unilever just needed the distribution in order to expand there Lipton product line. The other major distributer at the time was Snaple. Pepsi probably wanted a tea product to compete in that market area and that is most likely why they were interested in the partnership. I don't think it had anything to do with covering up sugary drinks. It was a move in the early 90s to diversify their product line and compete with Snaple. Bottle water is just stupid for most people and has shown increases of digestion of microplastics. If your tap water doesn't have lead, mercury, or pfas, You should be drinking tap water.
As a shareholder in both companies, I am torn on this. Do i drink pop, nope, but those my 600 lb lifers who do a few liters a day, well you help with my share price so...