Back in the day when folks used to walk five miles through the snow to go school, choosing a soda was easy. Where I lived I never heard the word ‘soda’ until I was eighteen. We called it ‘pop’. We only had a handful of brands from which to choose, and everything came in bottles.
The bottles needed to be opened with a ‘church key’ or a bottle opener because the cap was crimped on. There were no canned sodas, and the pop top wasn’t invented until 1963. When you were done with the bottle, it needed to be returned to the store for a refund on the 2-cent deposit you made when you bought it. Most people returned there bottles, but some didn’t bother. The bottling company would wash the bottles to sanitary standards and reuse them. Almost every commercial establishment had some sort of soda dispensing machine.
Now almost everything comes in cans or in plastic bottles (as if we didn’t have enough plastic bottles in the landfill.) The landscape of soda choices is staggering. First, you must choose a brand, then you decide do you want sugar or no sugar. Caffeine or no caffeine? Flavors? Bottle or can? Yes, there are several choices. Every so often a company will add a Limited Edition such as the one 7-Up is running right now – a Shirley Temple flavor.
The guy in this short video believes that glass is the way to go.
The favorite brand in America is Coca-Cola. They produce more than 500 different products worldwide, but luckily in America they sell about 50 different varieties. Dr Pepper is the second most popular brand. The parent company, Kuerig – Dr Pepper sells more than 125 varieties under labels such as, 7-Up, Crush, Canada Dry, Squirt, RC Cola, A&W, and of course Dr Pepper. Pepsi Cola brand produces just under 40 varieties. Together, the three major soda producing companies market more than 200 variations.
It is fortunate that most stores do not have the merchandising space to lay out every variety of every brand, but if they did the magnitude of the display would make one question whether or not all of this largess is reasonable.
Soda is not the only grocery item that is ripe for cutting back on the product mix.
Hormel has said it is going to cut back on its product line. Last year, the food giant sold 71 different versions of its Hormel Pepperoni brand. There was diced pepperoni, turkey pepperoni, mini-slices of turkey pepperoni, pepperoni sticks, pepperoni with 50% less sodium, pepperoni with 25% less fat, thick-sliced pepperoni, and the list goes on.
You can find a list of other producers trimming their product lines here.
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Carol
I always used the word ” pop ” growing up. I did not start using the word ” soda ”
until I began to work for MCI, and everyone from the big cities had never heard of
pop. It took me awhile before I called my pop, soda.