Tab Diet Soda Drinkers Want Coca-Cola To Start Selling Their Favorite Cola Again

ATLANTA, GA — There is a nation of diet soda drinkers who are mad at Coca-Cola. Well, it’s a small nation of 4,754.

That’s how many people have signed a petition as of Thursday asking the Atlanta-based soft drink company to bring back Tab, the soft drink in the pink can with the funky white lettering.

According to a Change.org petition, the cola acolytes have set a goal of 5,000 as enough to get the attention of news media.

They were only at 3,001 on Monday when Patch took notice. And CNN Business featured their plight Sunday, noting that the Coca-Cola C-suite was aware of their concerns as well.

"I got a lot of emails about Tab," Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey told CNN Business in December.

The website SaveTabSoda.com, which is dedicated to bringing back the soft drink, responded to Quincey’s comments with resolve: “THAT’S GREAT! We now have acknowledgment that they’re hearing us. But they still aren’t listening,” the website said. “Our efforts, while commendable, have not been enough to convince Coca-Cola why Tab is good for their business.”

The next phase of the plan is to raise money to rent billboards in Atlanta and pay for Google Ads to let Coke know how they really feel.

When the undisputed king of carbonated concoctions cut its cola count in October 2020, it said that some 200 brands that got nixed only accounted for 2 percent of the company’s total revenue.

The choice was easy given the competition and retailers’ needs to push what sells, Quincey said.

"In the end, it's a Darwinian struggle for space in the supermarket or in the convenience store," he said, telling CNN Business that if even a well-loved brand (like Tab) “sells a fraction of what these other bottles will sell, eventually it will get pulled out."

Still, Tab drinkers are a loyal and feisty lot.

The current petition campaign isn’t the first. When they learned that Tab was being pulled from the shelves more than a year ago, they organized to stop the steal of their favorite flavored refreshment. That Change.org movement to keep Tab in stores amounted to 3,408 signees.

From its inception in the '70s, the drink was marketed as hip and fun, with TV commercials showing fashionable, attractive young people and celebrities such as Jayne Kennedy, Elle Macpherson and Donna Rupert touting its “one calorie” sugar-freeness “for beautiful people.”

Trish Priest told CNN Business that she has been rationing cans from her remaining 23 12-packs in the hopes that her work with the Save Tab Soda Committee — a small group of the diet soda devotees who initiated the petitions — make a difference.

If not, "I have a box of [Diet Coke] syrup and a SodaStream, which is going to be my fallback solution," she said.

It’s good that she and other committee members have backup plans for alternatives to Tab, because a Coca-Cola spokesperson told CNN Business, “there are no plans to bring it back.”