PepsiCo has swapped its old sweetener for another, after several campaigns against the link of aspartame to grave conditions like cancer, and in an effort to boost its sales since its decline last year.
Diet Pepsi, Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi and Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi free of aspartame hit store shelves in the U.S. on Aug. 11.
"It's the number one thing that our customers have been calling about," said PepsiCo senior vice president Seth Kaufman.
The products are sweetened with sucralose in place of aspartame. According to Kaufman, the taste is not identical to the older products infused with aspartame, but it is nothing Diet Pepsi fans are not familiar with.
Sucralose is the same as the artificial sweetener found in small yellow packets of Splenda, while aspartame is the same as those in small blue packets of Equal or NutraSweet.
Popularly used in soda, aspartame is the sweetener found in products such as Diet Coke, Diet Dr. Pepper and Fanta Zero. It is an artificial non-saccharide sweetener used as a substitute for sugar in food and beverages. The sweetener is a methylester of the aspartic acid/phenylalanine dipeptide. Aspartame has been proven safe for human consumption, but people with the genetic condition phenylketonuria avoid it because it contains phenylalanine.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administratoin (FDA) did say that in a European study conducted on lab rats in 2005, aspartame was not found to be carcinogenic even when ingested in high levels.
Sucralose, on the other hand, is a non-nutritive sweetener. When ingested, majority of sucralose is not broken down by the body, making it non-caloric. It is three times as sweet as aspartame.
In 2014, Diet Pepsi sales went down 5.2 percent. According to industry executives, the decline was a result of people's unfounded concerns about aspartame.
In 2012, PepsiCo attempted to boost its sales by improving the drink with combined aspartame and acesulfame potassium or ace-K, which is another artificial sweetener known for keeping the drink's taste unaltered over time. Ace-K was also added to the new aspartame-free version of Diet Pepsi.
