Our Story The complete history

1963 – 2020 · The definitive guide

The complete history of TaB

Coca-Cola's first diet cola, born in 1963, named by a computer, beloved for half a century, and abruptly retired in 2020. This is the full story: the origin, the formula, the icon, the fade, the discontinuation, and the fans who refuse to let it end.

What is TaB?

The drink that proved diet could be desirable.

TaB, stylized TaB, was a diet cola produced by The Coca-Cola Company from 1963 until its discontinuation in 2020. It was Coca-Cola's very first diet cola, and for a time it was the best-selling diet soda in America.1

For millions of drinkers, TaB was never a substitute for anything. It had a crisp, citrus-edged bite all its own, and a pink can that turned a low-calorie soft drink into a statement of identity. This guide collects the full record: where TaB came from, how it was made and remade, why it faded, how it ended, and why a coast-to-coast community is still fighting to bring it back.

1963 · The beginning

Project Alpha & the first diet cola.

By the early 1960s, sugar-free soft drinks were no longer a fringe idea. Royal Crown's Diet Rite was selling briskly, and Coca-Cola, which had never made a diet cola of its own, wanted in.2

The numbers explain the urgency. In 1962, diet beverages made up less than 3 percent of all soft drinks sold, but Coca-Cola's own consumer research that year found as many as 28 percent of drinkers were interested in a low-calorie option. The gap between those two figures was the opportunity.7

The company's answer was an internal effort nicknamed "Project Alpha," begun in 1962 with a single goal: build the best-tasting diet cola and get it onto shelves by 1963. The team brought together engineers, technicians, and marketing experts under the leadership of Dr. Cliff Shillinglaw, and cleared a run of technological and engineering hurdles in a little over a year.7

Shillinglaw worked the formula side, hunting a saccharin-and-cyclamate cola with the right mouth feel and no off-putting aftertaste. Alongside him, Fred Dickson headed Coca-Cola's new marketing division and drove the naming and branding effort, while Tom Law ran the Fanta Beverage Company, the Coke subsidiary that would actually sell the new drink.8

Launching under a brand-new name wasn't only a branding choice. Coca-Cola's 1963 memo to bottlers argued that because TaB was not Coca-Cola, it fell outside the restrictive bottlers' contract that governed Coke itself, a real commercial reason to keep the two apart.8

TaB reached test markets in early 1963, and its first ads leaned on a simple promise: real cola taste for a single calorie.2 The magazine campaign asked, "How can just one calorie taste so good?" To bottlers, the company was almost apologetic, insisting it had no wish to injure the existing Coca-Cola business but could not let competitors take this segment of the market by default.8 That was a pointed answer to the competition. Plenty of diet sodas were already low in calories, but most carried a bitter aftertaste. TaB aimed to be the one that genuinely tasted good, and it largely succeeded.

Almost called Diet Coke

Nearly twenty years before Diet Coke existed, Tom Law argued the new drink should carry exactly that name. To Coca-Cola's leadership it was heresy, even for a progressive chief like Paul Austin. As one McCann adman put it at the time: "If God had wanted Coca-Cola to have saccharin in it, He would have made it that way in the first place." 1982 wasn't the first time the company faced this decision. It was the second.8

The original codename — before TaB had a name at all.

1963 · 1964 · The rise

From one Massachusetts bottling line to the whole country.

The first TaB was bottled in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1963 — the debut of the first low-calorie product in Coca-Cola's history.7

It moved fast from there. By 1964, barely a year after that first run, TaB was on shelves in more than 90 percent of the country, and by the middle of the decade it was the number one diet drink on the market — a title it held without interruption until Diet Coke arrived in 1982.7

That is a run of roughly seventeen years at the top of the category TaB effectively created. Every diet cola that followed, from Diet Coke to Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, was built on ground TaB cleared first.

One caveat worth noting. Mark Pendergrast's history of the company paints a less dominant early picture, putting TaB at roughly a 10 percent share of the weight-watcher market by 1964 and losing ground as soon as Diet Pepsi arrived that same year. The two accounts are likely measuring different things, single-brand ranking versus share of the whole diet category, but we'd rather show you both than pick the flattering one.8

The name

Named by a computer in 1963.

TaB's name didn't come from an ad agency brainstorm, it came from a mainframe.

To choose a name, Coca-Cola reached for an unlikely tool for 1963: an IBM 1401 mainframe. The team asked the machine to generate four-letter words built around a single vowel, then mixed in suggestions from staff. Out of more than 185,000 possibilities, they cut anything awkward to pronounce or too close to a name already on the market.1

That narrowed things to roughly twenty contenders. The pick was "Tabb", a wink at the idea of keeping tabs on your weight, and the spelling was trimmed to "Tab" before it ever reached a shelf.1

Coca-Cola's own bottling network tells the funnel slightly differently: marketing set the target at a three- to six-letter word and worked a list of more than 300,000 candidates down to 600, after which the legal team cut it to about two dozen. TaB won because it was distinctive, easy to remember, and projected exactly the image they wanted.7

Mark Pendergrast's history gives a third version: a "huge mainframe" that produced over 250,000 random three- and four-letter words, from ABZU and ACHU through ZORG and ZUFF, with staff suggestions folded in. In his telling the machine's output went straight to TAB, with no intermediate "Tabb" spelling.8

Accounts vary, and we won't pretend otherwise. Three credible sources give three different candidate counts (185,000, 250,000, and 300,000) and disagree on both the machine and the intermediate spelling. What they agree on is the essentials: a computer generated the shortlist, people made the final call, and the winner nodded at keeping tabs on your weight.

Myth check

You may have heard that TaB stands for "Totally Artificial Beverage." It's a fun rumor, and a complete fabrication. The name was a computer-generated coinage, not an acronym; the "artificial beverage" story has been debunked by both fans and Coca-Cola.2

An IBM 1401 mainframe computer installation, circa 1963 — the machine used to generate TaB's name
An IBM 1401 mainframe installation, c. 1963. Coca-Cola fed the machine a set of rules and it generated over 185,000 candidate names — TaB emerged from that list. Source: Wikipedia
The look

The capital-lowercase-capital that became iconic.

The unmistakable TaB wordmark, capital T, lowercase a, capital B, was the work of packaging designer Robert Sidney "Sid" Dickens.

Dickens is the one who locked in that off-kilter capitalization for the logo and drew a fresh bottle shape for the drink.1 The plan had originally been plain all-uppercase block letters, but Dickens argued that exaggerating the T would make the name stick. The a was dropped to lowercase to fit that new shape, then given a swirl and a small downward-pointing arrow so it wouldn't get lost between its two tall neighbors. The first glass bottles carried the same instinct for standing out: a textured surface and stylized snowflakes molded right into the glass.7

That logo, paired with the bold pink can that arrived in the 1970s, gave TaB one of the most recognizable identities in soda history, a futuristic, confident look that stood deliberately apart from the red-and-white of Coca-Cola itself. The pink can was a separate piece of work by a different designer, and that story is its own article.

Across the decades the branding was refined but never reinvented: minimalist modernism in the '60s, the bright "pink pioneer" era of the '70s, and a string of subtle updates after. Collectors now chase the striped cans, the metallic-pink variants — a timeline of American graphic design rendered in aluminum. See the full logo history →

c. 1970 · The pink can

Who made the can pink.

The pink can wasn't TaB's first look, and its designer's name was never recorded in the public history of the brand. It was Knut Simonson, a young packaging designer at Chicago's Dickens Design Group, sometime around 1970.

It started as a chemistry problem. After cyclamate was banned in 1969, TaB spent a stretch reformulated with real sugar, in a white can that said "Sugar Added, No Cyclamates." Once Coca-Cola settled on a saccharin-only formula, the can had to announce the opposite, clearly and at a glance. Simonson's answer was to repeat the words sugar free in script above the wordmark, and to throw out everything else.

The pink itself was already there. TaB's logo had been pink and blue; he kept the pink, dropped the blue, and let the one remaining color carry the whole can. It was a principle he'd learned at Container Corporation of America: refine a brand's identity, never replace it. That decision outlived the product. Every TaB can after it was pink.

All of it was done by hand, in magic marker, with no computers anywhere in the process. Simonson still has the concepts. He never expected the can to become an icon, and though he notices it in films and TV to this day, almost no one has ever known his name was behind it.

Read the full story, in his own words →

Five vintage TaB cans showing the pink can redesign in progress, from a hand-drawn marker concept to the finished production can
Knut Simonson's surviving cans, left to right: the hand-rendered marker mockup, a printed prototype with the same hand-drawn lettering, the version that reached the market, and two alternatives Coca-Cola passed on. Photo from his personal archive.
The formula

Reformulated as the science changed.

TaB's recipe was rewritten several times across its life, each change driven by the sweetener science (and regulation) of its era.

  1. 1963

    Cyclamate + saccharin

    TaB launched on a two-sweetener recipe, cyclamate working alongside saccharin. The cyclamate took the metallic edge off the saccharin, leaving the crisp, faintly tart taste fans remember.3

  2. 1969

    Saccharin only

    When U.S. regulators pulled cyclamate from the market in 1969, Coca-Cola rebuilt the recipe around saccharin on its own.3 The company saw it coming and started pulling TaB and Fresca from shelves before the ban was even official.8

    The replacement wasn't purely saccharin, either. Fresca went fully artificial, but TaB had a little real sugar added back alongside the saccharin, and Coca-Cola then secured FDA approval to advertise it as "six calories per fluid ounce" rather than the total per can, which conveniently made the returning calories harder to notice.8

    The ban itself barely scratched Coca-Cola, a $2.5 million fourth-quarter loss against a business where diet drinks were only a tenth of sales. Royal Crown, whose Diet-Rite led the category, was badly shaken.8

  3. 1970s

    The saccharin scare

    In the early 1970s, studies on lab rats tied heavy saccharin intake to bladder cancer, and Congress responded by requiring a warning label on anything containing it, TaB included. The worry never held up in humans: the FDA gave saccharin a clean bill in 2000, and the EPA struck it from its hazardous-substances list in 2010.1

    It took years to settle. Heavy lobbying from the diet industry won a congressional moratorium on the saccharin ban, but it expired in May 1978, and for a stretch nobody knew what lay ahead for an all-saccharin TaB.8

  4. 1984

    NutraSweet arrives

    In May 1984 Coca-Cola folded aspartame, sold as NutraSweet, into the blend alongside saccharin. It rounded out the sweetness, but plenty of longtime drinkers missed the sharper saccharin "bite" and never made peace with it.3

The taste

Crisp, clean, and impossible to copy.

Ask a TaB drinker what it tasted like and the answers are remarkably consistent.

  • "Crisp and clean."
  • "Not too sweet."
  • "A little citrusy."
  • "A bite that Diet Coke never had."

That last point matters. To the faithful, TaB and Diet Coke were never interchangeable. Diet Coke was built from a different flavor base, rounder, sweeter, more vanilla-forward. TaB was lean, bright, and sharp. People didn't drink TaB because they couldn't find Diet Coke; they drank it because nothing else tasted like it.

The TaB family

More than one pink can.

At the height of its popularity, the TaB name stretched across a whole lineup of sugar-free flavors, and, later, a few experiments that shared the name but little else.

1970s

Six sugar-free flavors

Beyond the cola, Coca-Cola offered TaB in Root Beer, Lemon-Lime, Ginger Ale, Black Cherry, Strawberry, and Orange, all diet.1

1983 · 1992

Caffeine-Free & Tab Clear

A caffeine-free TaB appeared in 1983, the same year Coke and Diet Coke went caffeine-free. Nearly a decade on, Tab Clear (1992) rode the short-lived craze for see-through colas.1

2006

TaB Energy

A TaB-branded energy drink turned up in 2006. It borrowed the name and the pink, but it was its own creature, a tart, sucralose-sweetened pick-me-up rather than the cola people loved.1

The '70s & '80s

TaB's moment in the sun.

As diet culture and health-consciousness surged through the 1970s, TaB was perfectly placed, and its bright pink can, minimalist type, and confident attitude made it instantly recognizable.

It became a fixture of offices, gyms, and home refrigerators; a shorthand for independence and self-expression; a favorite of celebrities and everyday loyalists alike. The advertising leaned into empowerment and style, TaB wasn't trying to be Coke, and that was the point.

The numbers backed up the image: even as competition multiplied, TaB was the best-selling diet soda in the United States in 1982.3

On screen

TaB in movies & TV

From the Silver Screen to streaming, TaB kept showing up — both in productions made during its heyday and in period pieces set during it. You can't fake the pink can.

Theatrical films
1975Jaws
1976Taxi Driver
1977Close Encounters of the Third Kind
1979Kramer vs. Kramer
1980Airplane!
1982E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
1983WarGames
1984Ghostbusters
1984The Terminator
1985Rambo: First Blood Part II
1988Scrooged
1998Gia
2018Ready Player One
2018Bumblebee
2022White Noise
2024Unfrosted
TV series
1989–1998Seinfeld
1998–2006That ‘70s Show
2007–2015Mad Men
2013–2018The Americans
2015–2022Better Call Saul
2016Vinyl
2016–presentStranger Things
2017–2019GLOW
2017–2019The Deuce
2019AHS: 1984
2019–presentRussian Doll
2022Winning Time
2023Daisy Jones & The Six
1982 · The turning point

Then Diet Coke arrived.

In 1982, Coca-Cola launched Diet Coke, a different drink that, crucially, carried the company's own flagship name.

Coke believed Diet Coke was the brand to carry it into the future and battle Diet Pepsi, and it shifted its marketing muscle accordingly. TaB's roughly seventeen-year reign as America's best-selling diet drink ended that year.7 For decades TaB and Diet Coke sat side by side on shelves, but the advertising dollars, and the attention, flowed to the newer brand. By many fans' accounts, TaB went essentially un-advertised from 1982 onward.2

Slowly, TaB grew harder to find, surviving in scattered pockets of the country rather than on every shelf.

The long fade

A shrinking footprint, and a global one.

The slide was slow but steady. By 2011 the company was turning out only about 3 million cases of TaB a year, while Diet Coke moved somewhere near 885 million. By 2019, TaB accounted for roughly one percent of Coca-Cola's cola business.5

Yet TaB was never just an American habit. At one time or another it poured in Canada, Spain, Norway (where it went by Tab X-Tra), the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the nations of the Southern African Customs Union; Australians drank it from the 1960s into the '80s, and it reached British shelves from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s.1

The hunt

Harder to find never meant forgotten.

As TaB grew scarce, its fans grew resourceful.

They drove across state lines, called stores weekly, shared sightings online, bought cases for friends, and stockpiled whenever they found it. Entire websites and forums sprang up for the sole purpose of tracking down where TaB was still in stock, and channels appeared to ship it when local shelves ran dry.

It was a grassroots distribution network built on pure loyalty. The community kept the one-of-a-kind cola alive long after Coca-Cola's marketing budget had moved on.

October 16, 2020

Coca-Cola announces the end.

On October 16, 2020, Coca-Cola announced it would stop making TaB by year's end, part of a pandemic-era housecleaning meant to trim slower sellers and put its weight behind a tighter set of brands.4

It wasn't the only casualty that day, the same announcement waved goodbye to Coca-Cola Life, Delaware Punch, Diet Coke Feisty Cherry, and Northern Neck Ginger Ale, among others. The last TaB rolled off the line on December 31, 2020, ending a 57-year run.4

The company's reasoning was volume: TaB simply didn't sell at the scale Coca-Cola wanted from a brand it kept in production. Rather than try to grow those numbers, Coke chose to retire it and focus on its core lineup and newer launches like Coca-Cola Zero Sugar.

For thousands of drinkers, though, it wasn't a portfolio decision. It was the end of a 57-year relationship, and the beginning of an organized fight to reverse it.

After 2020

Where TaB lives now.

TaB on tap at the Coca-Cola tasting room — the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta
TaB on tap at the World of Coca-Cola, Atlanta, 2024 — one of the only places you can still taste it.

Production has ended, and you can no longer buy TaB in a can or a bottle anywhere.

Today, fresh TaB survives in exactly one form: on fountain, at three Coca-Cola owned retail stores. You can still order a cup at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, the Coca-Cola Store in Las Vegas, and the Coca-Cola Store at Disney Springs in Florida. Supply comes and goes, so always call ahead to be sure it is pouring before you make the trip.

Everywhere else, TaB lives in personal collections: unopened cans tucked into the refrigerators and pantries of devoted fans across the country, saved like treasure. And, of course, it lives on in our memories.

The comeback

The movement to bring TaB back.

SaveTaBSoda billboard in Atlanta: We really miss TaB. Please bring it back! SaveTaBsoda.com
One of our billboards, right in Coca-Cola's backyard — Atlanta, Georgia.

Within weeks of the 2020 announcement, the grief turned into organization. In early 2021, fans founded the SaveTaBSoda Committee.1

Since then, the committee has gathered thousands of petition signatures, run coordinated call-in days to Coca-Cola, raised billboards in Coke's hometown of Atlanta, and delivered handwritten birthday cards straight to headquarters, even sponsoring a pink racecar to keep TaB in the public eye.

It's a single, coordinated voice for a coast-to-coast community: this beloved, one-of-a-kind cola deserves to come back. Read the committee's full story →

Why it matters

The diet cola that wrote the recipe everyone else followed.

TaB's legacy is bigger than one discontinued soda. It proved that a diet cola could carry the Coca-Cola name and succeed, the very idea that made Diet Coke, and later Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, possible.

It also represents something harder to put on a balance sheet: loyalty, identity, nostalgia, community, a flavor profile no modern cola has matched, and a base of demand that never fully went away. The campaign to revive TaB isn't about resisting change, it's about honoring a product that earned its place in American culture.

Three soda cans showing the progression: TaB (pink), Diet Coke (silver with red), and Coke Zero (red with black)
TaB
1963 → Diet Coke
1982 → Coke Zero
2005
TaB pioneered the recipe everyone else followed.
In their own words

Why fans won't let go

Real stories sent to us by TaB drinkers across the country, shared with their first names and lightly edited for length. Scroll through a few.

Have a TaB story of your own? Share it with us →

But the story isn't over
"The power to revive TaB rests with us."

The best way to help is the simplest: sign the petition, make some noise, and show Coca-Cola just how many of us still want this one-of-a-kind cola back.

Sign the petition → More ways to help

Sources & further reading

Where these facts come from.

This page is an original summary compiled by the SaveTaBSoda Committee from public reporting and reference works. Key facts are footnoted below.

  1. "Tab (drink)," Wikipedia — naming origins, the flavor lineup, international markets, and assorted dates. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(drink) ↩
  2. "The History of TaB and Why It Was Discontinued," The Daily Meal (2024) — Project Alpha, the "one calorie" campaign, the naming computer, and the post-1982 advertising freeze. thedailymeal.com ↩
  3. Jeffrey Miller, "The rise and fall of Tab," The Conversation (Nov. 2020) — the sweetener history (cyclamate, saccharin, NutraSweet), bottler resistance, and TaB's run as the best-selling diet cola of the 1970s–80s. theconversation.com ↩
  4. "Coca-Cola to stop selling Tab and other products," TODAY (Oct. 16, 2020) — the discontinuation announcement, the other retired brands, and TaB's decline after Diet Coke's 1982 launch. today.com ↩
  5. Beverage Digest, via "Cult Sodas With a History: Tab," Fortune / CNN Money (2009) — TaB's small-but-devoted following and the roughly 3 million cases a year it still sold in its later life. money.cnn.com ↩
  6. "Tab," Logopedia (logos.fandom.com) — visual archive of TaB logo and packaging designs across the brand's history. logos.fandom.com/wiki/Tab
  7. Pamela Neal, "Bidding a Fond Farewell to a Much-Loved Member of the Coca-Cola Family," Coca-Cola Bottling Company UNITED (Oct. 19, 2020) — 1962 development and market research, Dr. Cliff Shillinglaw's leadership of Project Alpha, the first bottling in Springfield, Massachusetts, the naming funnel, Robert Dickens' logo and bottle decisions, and TaB's run as the No. 1 diet drink from the mid-1960s until 1982. cocacolaunited.com ↩
  8. Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country & Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It, 2nd ed., revised and expanded — the Project Alpha team (Fred Dickson, Tom Law), Tom Law's 1963 push for the name "Diet Coke" and the response to it, the bottlers'-contract rationale, the "just one calorie" ad headline and the message to bottlers, and the mainframe naming account (p. 278); TaB's 1964 share of the weight-watcher market (p. 278); the pre-ban withdrawal, the sugar added back alongside saccharin, the "six calories per fluid ounce" labeling approval and the financial impact of the cyclamate ban (p. 291); the 1978 expiry of the congressional saccharin moratorium (p. 313). ↩

Spotted an error or have a primary source, photo, or memory to add? Tell us, we want this to be the most accurate TaB history anywhere.

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