The FDA has issues with Coca Cola's new Diet Coke Plus. It sent the company a letter earlier this month about the drink, which Coke purports to have a “refreshing taste…AND several essential nutrients” with “each 8 fl. oz. serving of Diet Coke Plus provid(ing) 15% of your RDI for niacin and vitamins B6 and B12, and 10% for zinc and magnesium”.
So what do the feds have a problem with? It's the word “plus”, believe it or not.
The FDA says that the drink fails to meet the standard for the word. Their letter to Coke goes on to say that the new drink is “misbranded … because the product makes a nutrient content claim but does not meet the criteria to make the claim.”
As an avowed hater of all things Diet drink (the aftertaste makes my mouth want shrivel up and die), my problem is not with the word “plus” (which I had no idea needed to be quantifiable), it's with their claim that it has a “refreshing taste”. Blech.
And they're going to put vitamins in it?! I'll take water, thank you.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.