KACY BURDETTE; 1, 2,3,4,5: COURTESY OF COCA-COLA; 6: JAMES LEYNSE/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; SIDEBAR: COURTESY OF ILOVETAB
Most people would be thrilled to live in a city as
hip and sophisticated as San Francisco. But Natalie
Kueneman, web developer by trade, remembers how
tough things were for her there. The problem wasn’t
that there was no arts or tech scene; it was that
Kueneman couldn’t find Tab cola for sale anywhere
in town. The nearest metro area that sold Tab was
Sacramento—75 miles away.
“Do you know Task Rabbit? I’d hire Task Rabbit
to drive to Sacramento,” she recalled on a recent
afternoon. “My Tab got very expensive.”
What’s surprising about this story isn’t so much
the lengths that Kueneman went to buy a brand of
soft drink, but that she’s hardly alone. When she’s
not working on projects for clients, Kueneman
runs ILoveTab.com, a fan site where one can learn
many fascinating things about Tab, but none more
singular than this: After 56 years and no shortage of
corporate neglect, Tab is still with us.
Tab wasn’t the first diet soda in America, but
it was the first one that mattered. In 1961, Royal
Crown introduced Diet Rite, which immediately
tapped into the 28% of Americans watching
their weight. Caught off guard, the soda giants
scrambled to get in on the action: Pepsi with a
drink called Patio Cola and, by May 1963, Coca-
Cola with a drink it called Tab.
Developed in less than a year by Coke’s Fanta
division, Tab used saccharin as a sweetener (sodium
cyclamate was the sweet stuff in Diet Rite) and
sported a sharp citrusy flavor that served up a mere
1 calorie in every six ounces. As for the name, an
IBM mainframe 1401 cranked out a randomized
collection of 2.3 million short names, from which
Coke execs eventually chose Tab. Early on, there
was a running joke that Tab was an acronym that
stood for “totally artificial beverage,” but the official
line is that the name was a reference to how women
were keeping tabs on their diet.
And for years, “The Beautiful Drink for Beautiful
People,” as Tab was advertised, did have plenty
of people drinking it. But it could not survive the
one-two punch that was coming. In the late 1970s,
a series of scientific studies (since dismissed)
linked saccharin to bladder cancer in rats, and Tab’s
reputation took a hit. Then, in 1982, the aspartame-
fueled Diet Coke appeared on shelves, which helped
drive down Tab’s share of Coca-Cola’s sales to 1%.
So why hasn’t Coke just unplugged the Tab
machinery and walked away? Well, for one, Tab
has functioned as a bit of a product incubator for
the company. In 1992, amid the craze for clear
beverages such as Zima and Crystal Pepsi, Coke
launched Tab Clear. (It flopped.) Fourteen years
later, as Monster Energy swept the teen market,
Coke debuted Tab Energy. (It flopped, too.) As of
2017, Tab accounted for a mere .03% of Coca-Cola’s
total sales. “I think it’s honestly kind of a miracle
that it’s still around,” Kueneman said.
But it is still around, and Coke corporate—
though it furnishes no marketing support—has
acknowledged that Tab has “a real cult following.”
Indeed, if this is possible, Tab has become rather
trendy again. At New York’s swank TWA Hotel—
housed in Eero Saarinen’s historic 1962 Flight
Center at JFK Airport—Tab is available in the lobby
and the rooms. Deadpanned Tyler Morse, CEO of
the hotel: “Tab has been America’s favorite totally
artificial beverage since 1963.”Insecurity Sells According to the CDC, of the 20% of us
who drink diet beverages on a daily basis, the split’s about
equal between men and women. But in the early 1960s
when Tab hit the market, the marketing department
clearly wasn't aiming at men. Tab ads played rather
shamelessly on the insecurities of women—especially
those in search of male validation—when it came to their
figures. One ad advised women that they could “stay in
his mind” by drinking Tab: “Have a shape he can’t forget.”
Another ad showed a slim woman in a sleeveless dress
winning the approving glance of a man across the dinner
table. She was, of course, sipping a Tab.To join in the diet-soda craze, Cola-Cola rushed Tab through R&D in less than a year (1), choosing a name
from a randomly generated list created by an IBM mainframe (2), then hiring famed designer Sid Dickens
to create a distinctive logo. (3) The result was a stylish six-pack of long-necked bottles (4), though these
eventually gave way exclusively to cans. Tab’s marketing invariably emphasized the lack of sugar, with
the best-known tagline asking: “How can just one calorie taste so good?” (5) In later years, after Diet
Coke made off with Tab’s market share, Tab became a product incubator of sorts, yielding unsuccessful
extensions like 2006’s Tab Energy. (6)ADWEEK 31
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