Thing is, since doing that taste comparison where I alternated sips several times between the two, I've consistently been able to tell if a drink was Pepsi or Coke. So while they are very very close, they are distinguishable to some people, if those people have trained their taste buds. (Or at least they were up to about 10 years ago, I don't know if they've changed the flavor in the past decade because I practically quit drinking soda at all once I got serious about maintaining a healthy weight.)
Pepsi has more vanilla and lemon. If you go do a blind test now I bet you’ll find them easy to tell apart.
I remember being upset since he claimed I failed to even point out Dr Pepper, which I still think is unbelievable since even its smell is super distinctive and way different from a cola.
[1]: https://www.mitti.se/nyheter/buset-pa-kungsgatan--butiken-bl... is the same store, article (in Swedish) about a recent prank someone did there
Bottom line: the brain takes a lot of shortcut to allow us to take decisions quickly and is easily fooled. We aren't much better than a tiny LLM model really.
I did something similar with co-workers recently, who didn't believe there is a meaningful difference between brands. I blind-tasted 6 different glasses and got each one right. I got my favorite (Coke) right just by the first smell, I just had to taste to see whether it was diet or not.
Not that this is a skill or anything. Its just that each of the brands I tasted has a strong characteristic flavor to me, and the difference between real sugar and artificially sweetened is also stark. I've been drinking diet versions for ages precisely because the sugary ones are just too sweet for me.
I don’t have trained taste buds, but something in Pepsi is off putting to me. Worse is artificial sweeteners, which I think I’m have whatever mutation makes aspartame taste bitter. I could never understand why people like Diet Coke, but it turns out I’m the strange one.
I reckon from experience that's correct. For example, I can't drink Pepsi Max as it's far too sweet (all I taste is sweetness, on its own that's not very appealing).
With millions of dollars tied up in just a few percent of sales you can bet Pepsi knows just about as much as Coke does about Coke's ingredients (and vice versa of course).
The research for both companies is more about the fine minutiae—keeping an optimal differentiation between the two products more than treading on each other's territory. Trampling over each other for market share is done through advertising, not by making their products the same.
Most trade secrets aren't really all that secret.
Some people perhaps. Restaurants usually only carry one or the other so you don't get a choice.
It probably didn’t take them terribly long to do it
I recall some years ago Pepsi making the claim they could replicate Coke to the point of it being essentially indistinguishable but that's wasn't the point, their branding required Pepsi to be clearly differentiated from Coke—commercially that seems to make sense.
It's unclear how accurate Pepsi's claims are but they seemed to be based on tasting trials where people couldn't tell the 'clone' from the real thing.
Seems to me Pepsi was likely right, if we consider how close this formulation is to Coke and that it was produced with limited resources then one would expect Pepsi with its huge resources to grind their 'clone' as fine as they deemed necessary.
These days, Coke's 'secret' formula is more a publicity stunt than anything else.