To help cola drinkers "imagine what the future tastes and feels like," Coca-Cola has come out with a new limited-edition flavor called Coke Y3000 (for Year 3000). It's the first beverage flavor created with the help of artificial intelligence. There's only one problem: many customers don't seem to like it. The launch is a cautionary tale for every entrepreneur or business leader who's been tempted to use a trendy marketing ploy to launch a new product, instead of actually listening to customers.
To underscore Coke Y3000's futuristic nature, the cans and bottles are decorated with what the company describes as "liquid in a morphing, evolving state, communicated through form and color changes that emphasize a positive future," a design that was also created using A.I. And the containers feature the augmented reality images that are an increasingly popular packaging feature. In this case, drinkers can use the AR to transform their surroundings to the imagined year 3000 by recasting their environment in upbeat pastel colors, and adding greenery. (If you want to try out this effect for yourself, you can do that here.)
"What the future might taste like."
"We hope that Coca-Cola will still be as relevant and refreshing in the year 3000 as it is today," Oana Vlad, senior director, global strategy said when Coke Y3000 launched this month, adding, "so we challenged ourselves to explore the concept of what a Coke from the future might taste like." Vlad went on to say, "We intentionally brought human intelligence and A.I. together for an uplifting expression of what Coca-Cola believes tomorrow will bring."
Is it just me, or does all this seem a bit...overblown? Coca-Cola is certainly a large and successful company, and its products may be refreshing, but are they really all that relevant? I can't help thinking about how Steve Jobs lured John Sculley away from his job as CEO of PepsiCo by asking Sculley, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" To me, Coke's description of its supposedly future-tasting soft drink feels like it was written by people who've spent too long inside of the giant company's worldview and have lost some sense of proportion.
What does Coke Y3000 taste like?
But the bigger problem is what customers think of the new beverage--many of them don't much like it. They all agree that it tastes like Coke mixed with something else, but they don't agree on what that something else is. Some say it reminds them of peach. One person who tasted it tweeted: "The 'futuristic' flavor of Coke Y3000 is basically half-flat Coca-Cola mixed with spoiled red vermouth, alcohol removed." Others had more unpleasant comparisons for what that extra flavor might be.
Some said it reminded them of when they were kids and used a self-serve soda fountain to mix all the flavors together. This makes sense, since A.I. generally works by taking in huge amounts of data, then "creating" new things by recombining that data in different ways.
The thing is, we've seen this movie before. Coke Y3000 is just the latest in a series of limited- edition flavors with extremely abstract notions of what they're supposed to taste like. The first of these was Coca-Cola Starlight, which was supposed to taste like outer space. People who tasted it said it reminded them of cotton candy or graham crackers, and was extremely sweet. Not everyone loved it, but a lot of consumers really took to it.
But things have pretty much gone downhill from there, as Coke introduced flavors like Dreamworld, which was supposed to taste like dreams, and Soul Blast (released in Asia), which was supposed to taste like action. In April 2022, the company introduced Coca-Cola Byte, "born in the metaverse" and "inspired by the playfulness of pixels," according to Vlad. That beverage, which reportedly tasted like a cross between a Coke and a Red Bull (but without the extra caffeine) was so disliked that it was one of Inc.'s failed product launches of 2022.
Coca-Cola is a $244 billion company, and it can keep launching limited-edition flavors that people don't like for as long as it wants. And if you agree with the notion that all publicity is good publicity, then perhaps this new soda that A.I. helped create is a success, as it certainly has generated some headlines. And given Coke's huge market, there are probably enough curious customers to buy out small batches of limited-edition sodas. But if you're an entrepreneur or small-business owner, something like this could be a fatal mistake.
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