This Discontinued Coca-Cola Flavor Still Haunts Our Nightmares

As it turns out, even world-conquering megacorporations can experience the fear of missing out. Back in the early 2000s, trendy coffee chains like Starbucks were enjoying a great deal of popularity, and Coca-Cola was seething. It was a soft drink company, of course, but it did sell sweet caffeinated beverages, and now these barbarian hordes of Frappuccino-hawking, Norah Jones-listening hipsters were stealing its thunder. The conglomerate had to compete somehow, and so the ill-fated Coca-Cola BlāK came to be — at least for a little while — before it was undone by consumer apathy and a few PR misfires. Now, it's just one of the discontinued sodas we don't miss.

The idea behind it was sound, at least. Espresso-based sodas, from brands like Manhattan Special and BibiCaffè, had been around for decades, if not centuries. Surely a company with the resources of Coca-Cola could find a way to produce a hit, right? But Coca-Cola BlāK was marred by misstep after misstep, starting with the name. Although you could certainly get away with pronouncing it like the word "black," the accent mark over the letter A would mean it should be pronounced more like "blake." Intending no offense toward William Blake, James Blake, or any other Blake out there — we're not sure that's a great name for your coffee-flavored soda. Häagen-Dazs could get away with inventing a fake, foreign-sounding name for its product, but maybe people expected more from Coca-Cola.

There were other problems with Coca-Cola BlāK, too. For instance, one of the slogans Coca-Cola promoted for the soda was, "The taste of the black experience," which, taken at face value, is an absurdly bold claim to make about any drink, let alone one that had only just hit the market. There was also a lot of confusion over what Coca-Cola BlāK was actually supposed to be. Was it a coffee-flavored soda? A soda-flavored coffee? An energy drink that tasted like both coffee and soda? Coca-Cola didn't seem clear on the matter, which meant nobody else knew what it was, either.

Then, of course, there was the matter of taste. Coca-Cola BlāK was first tested in France, where it was sweetened with cane sugar, and by all accounts, it went pretty well. So the corporation launched the same recipe in America, right? Nope! Americans got a version of the drink sweetened with both high fructose corn syrup and the artificial sweetener aspartame (which is used in your favorite fridge cigarette, Diet Coke). Not only was the sweetener cloying, but it was followed by a pungent punch of coffee with the characteristic just-licked-a-battery aftertaste of aspartame. Needless to say, this was not a recipe for success. The drink was discontinued in 2008. Just 10 years later, Coca-Cola resurrected the concept with Coca-Cola with Coffee, and thankfully, executed the idea much better — and without any goofy accent marks in the name.