TAB

Coca-Cola launched TAB in 1963 as its first diet soft drink, its bold pink-and-white can (the logo styled "TaB") aimed at calorie-counting shoppers. It worked: through the 1970s and into the early '80s, TAB was the best-selling diet soda in the United States, a genuine phenomenon and the diet cola.

Its reign ended at the hands of its own corporate sibling. When Coca-Cola launched Diet Coke in 1982, the new brand cannibalized TAB almost overnight, and TAB's decline began in earnest. It weathered the era's saccharin cancer scare — 1970s studies had linked the sweetener to bladder cancer in rats, prompting congressionally mandated warning labels — and switched to a NutraSweet blend in 1984, which alienated some of the die-hards who liked the original bite. By then it had settled into the role it would play for the rest of its life: a cult drink with a small, devoted following and increasingly spotty distribution.

That is the honest shape of TAB's story — its true heyday was the late '70s and early '80s, not the '90s, when it survived mostly as the pink can your mom or grandmother still hunted down on a bottom shelf. But survive it did, outlasting expectations by decades, until Coca-Cola finally discontinued it on December 31, 2020, in a pandemic-era pruning of its portfolio. For its cult, the pink can never really stopped being cool.