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Comment by Smaug123 | Hacker News Reader

I'm fairly anecdotally sure there would be a market for much less sweet fizzy drinks. I know I'm a weird outlier, because I dilute fruit juice with water to make it more palatable, but I think I'd really like sugary soft drinks if they had the same flavour but heroically less sweetness. My favourite soft drink is two parts orange juice from concentrate, to one part carbonated water; perhaps that's not sweet enough for mass-market, but I'm not the only one who stays away from fizzy drinks because they find them too sweet.

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I thought the same thing about yogurt. The flavored ones have a lot of sugar and people I know say they want a less sweet version.

Then last week I met a man in the supermarket. We were both staring at various yogurts. I was comparison shopping; he was "spying" on the competition and the store. You see, he worked for a yogurt maker.

He asked me what I considered important and I asked him about reduced sugar variants. He said this topic came up over and over in market research. Customers demand reduced sugar. But when they do taste testing, most of those customers choose a product with mainstream sweetness. They want the idea of less sugar. But their tastebuds are not prepared for it.

Yeah. It's because we've been given sugary shit en masse for decades. It's like asking someone addicted to heroin if they would like to stop doing heroin.

Anyway, the rise of Greek yogurt at least shows that this isn't 100% true. It does need a little sugar for me to find it palatable as breakfast, but like, we're talking 2 or 3 sliced strawberries or a handful of blueberries.

>It's because we've been given sugary shit en masse for decades.

For weeks. It only takes a few weeks for your sense of taste to adjust to a change in diet.

"People" isn't one person. Maybe most people choose sweeter yogurt, but that doesn't mean there isn't a substantial minority of people who would prefer less sweet yogurt.

Who knows if these tests even accurately measure what people would actually buy? I remember that Coca-Cola did such tests too once...

The guy I spoke with was unequivocal: they don't think they can sell enough to make it worth any shelf space at all. Their brand in my market gets allocated enough space for about five flavors. They know exactly what sells how much and where, and they know it to some extent for their competitors too (none of whom produce reduced-sugar, but most of whom do produce reduced-fat).

Now, if your argument is that these full time professional market researchers can't figure out what people would actually buy...well, I thought the guy sounded extremely intelligent and well trained, and he had no reason to deceive me.

it's a vicious circle

this is where there's a role for regulation to break the loop

It's very common in Germany to mix e.g. apple juice with fizzy water (called Apfelschorle), the ratio according to your liking.

Speaking about markets for alternative solutions, I would very much appreciate more reusability in containers. Like the Germans do with (some sizes of) plastic Cola bottles - they get refilled, not recycled. We waste ridiculous amounts of energy on making throwaway packaging. Recycling helps limit the waste, yes, but more often than not it seems like an attempt to optimize an utterly broken solution that shouldn't have been implemented in the first place.

In a sad turn of events in Scotland, Barr moved away from reuse of bottles for Irn Bru and its other drinks at the end of last year: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-33985022

As a kid, I collected bottles from wherever I could find them, and returned them to get more juice, or stickers, or trading cards, or sweets. Some shopkeepers even gave you the money back in cash, rather than making you use it to buy something from them, and those were the preferred shops at which to return the bottles. When I visited Canada with family as a teenager, I diligently returned all the plastic bottles and cans I came across for the 5c refund.

Nowadays, I live in a poor part of town, and right up until Barr stopped the refund, I would see kids going around picking up Barr bottles and returning them. Whilst they were doing that, they'd usually (unprompted) pick up other bits of rubbish and drop them in the bin too, effectively cleaning as they went.

That 30p refund might not mean much to most people, but to some people, it means a lot --- and as an unintended benefit, it encouraged a certain conscientiousness and pride in the place they lived. I'm sad that they stopped it, and that's without even considering the environmental impact.

I agree. I find that the more you go without, the sweeter things taste when you go back. I used to drink diet fizzy drinks and then found the regular ones way too sweet.

If you are an out-lier then I'm positively martian. I don't drink fruit juices or fizzy drinks. I eat the fruit and drink water, coffee and alcohol (the latter a few times a week).

Yoghurt drinks: UK local asian restaurants will bring you a glass of lassi, either sweet or with salt.

I think a large part of the "taste" of "fizzy" drinks is governed by the amount of sugar and salt they put in it. I also dilute plain fruit juice with water as it feels more palatable, but I don't mind fizzy drinks as they're very refreshing.

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