What is the difference between Dr. Pepper Zero Sugar and Diet Dr. Pepper?
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Zero tastes more like regular Dr Pepper than Diet, why I don’t know but I suspect some form of wizard-based magic is at play. (I think it uses different sweetener in combination with aspartame and the effect is a flavor closer to actual sugar but I like my answer better)
If I remember correctly from looking at the ingredients list, it’s just a different blend. Ingredient lists are in order of greatest percentage to least percentage, and with both Dr. Pepper & Coca Cola, the Diet and the Zero Sugar blends have slightly different orders of a few ingredients.
You can not just replace the sugar with a sweetener and expect the same taste. Every sweetener are also bitter and have a taste to them. So replacing one ingredient does change the taste profile of the soda. So sugar free versions of sodas usually use a different formula. There are different ways of doing this though. You can either try to match the non-diet versions taste as close as possible. Or you can just try to make it taste as good as you can. In addition there is some irrational preferences to different sweeteners so in order to cater for everyone you want different sugar free variants using different sweeteners available. This gives a lot of options which is why you see a lot more sugar free variants of soda then the original versions.
I am not quite sure exactly what the differences between the Dr. Pepper variants are. The formula for Diet Dr. Pepper dates back to 1962 and have sometimes been marketed as tasting just like the regular and sometimes marketed as tasting differently. Dr. Pepper Zero Sugar was only launched in 2021 and they did try to make it as similar to the original taste as they could. A lot of the variants of Diet Dr. Pepper was replaced by the equivalent Zero Sugar variants at the same time but Diet Dr. Pepper still remains in its original formula.
Back in the olden days, people wanted a sugar free soda, so they came up with aspartame, a chemical that tastes sweet, but is (effectively) calorie free. The problem is, it tastes funny.
So, as time progresses, people still want a sugar free soda that DOESNT taste funny, so they came up with a modification of aspartame called Ace-K, it has all the benefits of aspartame, but doesn’t taste funny (or not as funny atleast) so they swapped out the sugar in Diet Soda for the new stuff. BUT some people LIKED the taste of diet soda, and they didnt want their drink to change. SO along came the Zero soda line, advertising 0 calories, but the same taste as regular.
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