Coca-Cola Peach Zero

Hi Everyone! How are you? I am fine.

Firstly, let’s address the elephant in the room shall we? Coke isn’t a food is it? It’s a drink. Great start you idiot! Your first food isn’t even a food!

Well you can wind your neck in buddy, because I wanted to call this blog ‘Novelty items you put in your mouth’, but that was not only less snappy, it was likely to attract a kind of reader who would have ultimately been disappointed with the content (even more so than usual). So let’s just agree that from now on, the term ‘novelty food’ encompasses drink and we can all stay friends, does that sound nice? Good!

I found this item in March 2018, in the petrol station I go to every day to buy my lunch (If that’s not depressing enough for you, I go there so often they just ask if I want ‘the usual’ when I go in. It’s a petrol station. A petrol station. People buy petrol there.)

This particular petrol station is Shell, for those of you looking to partake in a taste test of your own. Other petrol stations are available, and don’t blame me if not all Shell stations sell peach coke, blame them.

Novelty

Fruity/flavored coke is not a new thing and on the face of things there’s no reason this shouldn’t work. I love Cola, and Cherry Coke is the king of all novelty food items. A novelty food that (taste wise at least) surpassed the item on which it’s based, and it’s stayed in circulation since. But just because a thing sounds like a good idea, it doesn’t make it one does it? Just look at communism.

Coca Cola have tried novelty diet products in the past with varying success, (vanilla, lemon and lime etc.), so while this is exciting, it's not a new idea.

Packaging

The packaging is decent, the orange flashes set it apart from the rest of the cola on the shelves and drew my attention. The Coca-Cola bottle is in my view one of the greatest ever designs in the history of Human achievement, and they’ve done well not to mess with it too much. I would have liked to have seen the Coca-Cola red replaced entirely with the peachy orange though. It would have made the bottle stand out in it’s own right a bit.

Maybe they’ve tried to play down the novelty there. It suggests ‘it’s just like normal coke, but a bit peachy, don’t worry though! It’s pretty much the same, it’ll be OK!’ instead of ‘IT’S BLOODY PEACHY COKE! CAN YOU IMAGINE? QUICK! BUY IT! DRINK IT! YOU MAY NEVER SEE IT AGAIN!’. Mistake 1.

Again, I’m comparing it to Cherry Coke, the Cherry red makes it distinctive and helps it stands out, but the Coca Cola font and design keeps it on brand. Easy.

Marketing

Marketing is particularly key in Novelty foods. I’m a sucker for a good advert, and if I see enough bus stops, buses and TV shows advertising anything I will definitely buy it, guaranteed. I don’t remember seeing a single advert for this product. I Googled it, and found a couple of newspaper articles, but nothing else. Mistake 2.

I’m not pretending to know more about marketing that the hundreds of highly trained, impressively paid, hugely experienced advertising executives working for the Coca-Cola company, but I can categorically state they were wrong on this one, and I am right.

Taste and Texture

I must give a small caveat here. I ruddy love me some Coca Cola.

I used to drink gallons of it, until I recognized some of the tell-tale signs of an addiction starting and forced myself to give it up (withdrawal symptoms for the first few days included genuinely included severe headaches, dizziness and sleepless nights). Now I’m down to a can a week, and maybe an extra one if I happen to have a hangover. I Love Coke and I would marry Cherry Coke if that kind of thing wasn’t frowned upon. I was very excited about this prospect.

The first taste was nice, it was very peachy, there was no denying it. This was a peach flavored drink, 100%. Peaches up the wazoo.

But a few sips in and I began to lose interest. The sugary taste was a bit too artificial for even me, and the watery texture that all diet soda suffers from when compared to the full fat alternatives started to become more and more apparent. In was getting bored after 100 ml, and sick of it by 250ml.

I finished the 500ml bottle because I’m a dedicated and brave man, but I didn’t want to. The fact that I love sugary drinks in general and Coke in particular, makes that a particularly damning statement.

So, final verdict, and it’s a mixed bag. Decent packing, no obvious marketing support, certainly not disgusting, but it won’t be pushing it’s more famous cousin, Cherry Coke, for top billing any time soon…

Final Scores:

Taste- 4/10 Too Sweet

Texture- 4/10 Too Watery

Packaging- 7/10 Coca-Cola knows what they’re doing. Don’t mess with a classic formula.

Marketing- 1/10 What Marketing?

Novelty factor- 4/10 Exciting, but not a new idea, from the brand that seems to bring out novelty flavors at least annually.

Overall 20/50

It’s the first one, I have no idea if that’s a good score. Novelty food often sounds like a better idea than it is, and Coca-Cola Peach Zero may just be a victim of that. It’s doesn’t look too clever though…

I Found a Diet Coca-Cola Mango in the same petrol station, so a review of that will follow at some point in the future. Exciting Times!

Update!: after buying and tasting Diet Cola-Cola Mango, I could have written the exact same blog as above. To avoid anyone having to read through this twice, I'm not going to bother. It was fine.