robbieinjapan.com

So I walked into my local convenience store (called “conbini” in Japanese) to buy some breakfast for tomorrow when I happened to look into the drink section and saw something called “Pepsi Ice Cucumber”. When I saw it, I thought, “only in Japan…”

Ten minutes later, after I had returned to my room from the convenience store, I turned on my computer. I opened up my web browser and my home page, yahoo.com, came up, showing some headline news articles that included this one: Cucumber-flavored soda sold in Japan – now, how exactly cucumber-flavored soda makes front page news, I’m not sure, but I suppose it is pretty crazy. Take a look at the link, there’s even a picture of the soda.

It seems Pepsi has recently been trying pretty hard to break into the Japanese market. Recently, they released “Pepsi NEX”, a “zero calorie” soda. The ads for this thing are on TV all the time and I often see poster ads on the walls in the train station. As a result, I think Coke recently released “Coca-Cola zero” which is their “zero calorie” soda. I’m pretty sure they released this in response to Pepsi NEX because the label looks almost exactly the same… they use the all black label which Pepsi NEX was the first to use.  Additionally, the label for “Coca-Cola zero” features the word “zero” in big letters under the name “Coca Cola” which is exactly what Pepsi does on their label.

Additionally, I’m not really sure how “Coca-Cola zero” differs from “No Calorie Coca-Cola” which has been sold for quite a while here. The “No Calorie Coca-Cola” is essentially Diet Coke since the label is exactly the same as the diet version of Coke back in the US, that is, the gray background with the red lettering.

Actually, I just looked at the ingredients list for “Coca-Cola zero” and “No Calorie Coca-Cola”. They are exactly the same. The only difference is that “No Calorie Coca-Cola” has 7mg of sodium while “Coca-Cola zero” has 8mg of sodium. I’m not exactly sure how much this changes the taste. Interestingly enough, Pepsi NEX has a little more than double the sodium at 17mg.

In any case, the difference between “No Calorie Coca-Cola” and “Coca-Cola zero” seems to be pretty small and perhaps clearly Coca-Cola’s response to Pepsi NEX since Coke’s new label clearly mimics Pepsi’s. I suppose in this case, marketing is just as, if not more, important than the actual product.

Given that, it seems that Pepsi’s new move into the Japanese market is the cucumber soda. This would never work in America… but who knows, maybe it’ll do well in Japan. I doubt it though, but I guess I’ll have to buy it once just to see what it tastes like.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 7:43 am and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.