Well, that’s disappointing. As we mentioned last year: cane sugar Pepsi, aka Pepsi Raw, was in the works. We were excited about this not because we’re Pepsi fans. No, Pepsi tastes like stale Coke. Although it’s not as bad as RC, which tastes like stale Pepsi. No, we wanted this because it might encourage Coke, who we’ve been yelling at for a while about doing a cane sugar version themselves (Coca-Cola Prime! Do it).
Now, we learn that Raw has been rolled out…exclusively to the Brits. And it’s even more of an interesting remix than we first thought:
Traditionally, Pepsi contains fructose corn syrup, sugar, artificial colourings, phosphoric acid, caffeine, citric acid and natural flavours. In comparison, Pepsi Raw has only natural ingredients including apple extract, plain caramel colouring, coffee leaf, tantaric acid from grapes, gum arabic from acacia trees, cane sugar and sparkling water.
Fascinating. We’d be fine just losing the high fructose corn syrup, but we’ll try anything once.
All we can say to our friends across the pond is: ball is in your court. I know this is a hellacious sacrifice to ask of you, but in support of your less fortunate brothers and sisters over here and elsewhere…(deep breath)…buy Pepsi products. I don’t say such things lightly. But watching Pepsi succeed is about the only way to get Coke to do anything sensible.
If you want Pepsi Raw in the USA it might be an idea to get in touch with Britvic (http://www.britvic.com/Brand.aspx?id=86) who manufacture and distribute Pepsi products in the UK (and some of Europe). Who knows, they may be allowed to send you some crates of it. Pepsi in the UK as well as Coke – like in Mexico, contains ordinary sugar (usually this is Beet rather than cane because we produce beet in Europe) rather than HFCS. There is an upper limit on the manufacture and importation of HFCS in the EU which stands at around 300,000 metric tonnes p/a, for the whole EU – so when its gone its gone.
RG: Thanks for the info…I’m sure some others will make use of that, however thanks to recent highly *cough cough* scientific experiments, I’m less concerned about real sugar vs. HFCS since I can’t bloody well taste the difference. But again, others are more concerned and will no doubt want to do something until Pepsi finally makes Throwback available here year-round.