Coca-Cola for the day

James C. Cobb has a Time article about Coke:

On 11 July 1985, following the New Coke debacle, Coca-Cola returned to its previous formula.
Network executives had been understandably hesitant to interrupt the nation’s most popular daytime soap opera, yet viewers raised few complaints after ABC’s Peter Jennings broke into General Hospital, on 10 July 1985, to tell them that, bowing to public outrage and stunned by the anemic sales figures of its replacement, Coca-Cola was moving to put its previous soft-drink formula back on the market.
This decidedly welcome news came just eighty days after the traditional version had been pulled abruptly to make way for New Coke. The almost palpable chagrin enveloping the company’s official press briefing on the about-face was a far cry from the unrestrained bravado that had marked CEO Roberto Goizueta’s announcement back on 23 April that Coca-Cola was scrapping its jealously guarded secret formula, which had gone unchanged for almost a century, in favor of a new mixture that he promised would be a “bolder,” “rounder”, and more “harmonious” flavor. He failed to mention that it would also be markedly sweeter; doing so would have meant admitting that the more sugary appeal of Pepsi was steadily encroaching on Coke’s market share. The radical change struck consumer-marketing experts as more than a little risky, though Goizueta insisted at the time that he and his colleagues considered it “the surest move ever made”.
Not for long they didn’t, for company switchboards were soon drowning in a torrent of as many as eight thousand calls a day from irate consumers suddenly deprived of the dependable drink that had always suited them just fine. Like the otherwise matronly lady interviewed by Newsweek at an Atlanta, Georgia supermarket who needed but a single sip of New Coke to declare that “it sucks,” most who rallied to pop-up protest groups like Old Coca-Cola Drinkers of America may have simply been taking their cue from their palates. Yet others appeared to be speaking more from their hearts as they likened Coke’s switcheroo to a blasphemous assault on their most cherished icons and precepts. Some compared it to burning the flag or rewriting the Constitution. “God and Coca Cola” had been “the only two things in my life,” one complained in a letter, “now you have taken one of those things away from me.”
Stunned by this fierce and unrelenting backlash, not to mention New Coke’s disappointing sales, Coke’s spin-meisters scrambled to put the best possible face on the fiasco. Company president Donald Keough observed that, despite the extensive and expensive taste-testing that seemed to confirm New Coke’s surefire appeal, there had simply been no way to gauge the “deep and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people”.
While it is tempting to see the outcome of this miscalculation as a rare triumph of simple popular preference over the typically indomitable forces of modern marketing, its genesis actually lay in Coca-Cola’s historically acute sensitivity to shifting market factors, such as the massive socioeconomic and demographic changes that had begun to sweep across America after World War Two.
Coke’s original formula was developed in 1886 by entrepreneurial Atlanta pharmacist John S. Pemberton. He briefly marketed it in syrup form to soda fountain operators before selling out to fellow Atlantan Asa G. Candler. The ambitious Candler then hired a small but extremely aggressive cadre of “drummers” who, by 1895, had established footholds for Coca-Cola in every state in the union, not only in major cities, but also in small-town pharmacies whose soda fountains were the principal, if not sole, community gathering places.

Rico says it's as addictive as that other coke (the sniffable kind), but he's discovered the Real Thing: Coca-Cola made in Mexico with sugar, just like Pemberton made it: