Meet Coke Blak: Soda with a coffee kick
Posted by TheShot on 19 Mar 2006 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends
From the Sarasota Herald Tribune, Coca-Cola has revealed a little more of their latest beverage play in the hopes of cashing in on consumer interest in specialty coffee. Coke Blāk (no, I am not making this up) is scheduled to hit U.S. store shelves April 3: Meet Coke Blak: Soda with a coffee kick.
According to Coca-Cola, the coffee-flavored beverage will have “fewer calories but more caffeine than regular Coke.” Apparently, whether or not it tastes like shoe polish will only be of secondary importance to consumers.
Refrigerated beverage fads come and go faster than Pepsi A.M. So what really makes me curious is what Coke still has up their sleeves — given all their recent patent applications for single-serving coffee pods, pod brewing systems, and a system for steaming milk.
UPDATE: Aug. 31, 2007
Beverage giants introduce and discontinue products more and more like movie production companies, and coffee flavoring was just one of the many fads. According to yesterday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Coke’s Blāk turned out to be a lot more wishful hype than real consumer interest or sales: Coke Blak goes dark | ajc.com. Coke has pulled the plug on the product and is now concentrating on selling the remaining inventory in clearance-sale fashion.
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[...] The seminal L.A. punk rock band, X — in their 1987 song “See How We Are” — mocked our so-called “freedom of choice” when they sang about how there were seven kinds of Coke and 500 kinds of cigarettes. By December 2005, there were 28 kinds of Coke (and this before this month’s introduction of Coca-Cola BlāK). This is a marketing trend that’s not going away anytime soon. [...]
[...] Coca-Cola continues its coffee beverage push, recently announcing a drink to be launched in July that’s “more decadent than just plain coffee”: New coffee launched by Coca-Cola and Godiva – Drinks Business Review. Undoubtedly, it will be another Coca-Cola BlāK — meaning that we should expect consumers’ short attention spans to give this a shelf life until about September 2006. [...]
[...] to also support barista-free coffee service for restaurants and cafés. (Despite oddities like Coke Blāk, they show no interest in direct retail of coffee products.) Of course, a company like Coca-Cola [...]