Glucoholic - Sugar Free Snacks

Not reaching potential. The Glucoholic’s parents heard this often around report card time so he knows a little something about the concept. Sprite Zero’s report card doesn’t sound much better. Let’s start with the basics. Sprite Zero contains zero of almost everything known to man, except for 25mg of sodium. It’s sweetened with aspartame and acesulfame potassium. This combination makes the drink much more tolerable than diet sodas of yesteryear, and the original Sprite flavor is evident. What cannot be escaped is the unrelenting, unemotional, uncaring aftertaste of that aspartame. Even cut with acesulfame potassium the bitterness is still there.

Here’s where The Glucoholic gets to do some report card filling out of his own. Coca-Cola, this drink could have been a home run. Simply choosing to sweeten it with Splenda would probably have yielded a soft drink indistinguishable from it’s naturally sweetened sister. As driven, this drink is a potential A+ student doing B- work.

But we can’t stop the evaluation here. The Glucoholic made the mistake of attempting to find out anything about Sprite Zero on the Coca-Cola website (not linked on principle). We thought we had seen the pinnacle of hideous websites when MySpace hit the internets, but the Coke website is the new winner. After plenty of pop-ups, IE only features, and ignored tangents for music, social networking, and rewards programs we finally came to the conclusion that there just isn’t any information on the website about their actual products. How sad.

The most ironic stop on the website journey was finding some Cherry Coke swag to place on your MySpace page. You know, it’s really like seeing crack dealers putting up crack billboards on crack houses. Is it that difficult to keep kids loyal to something they are addicted to?