Coca-Cola has been quietly reducing the amount of sugar in some of its biggest drinks.
The company's president and CEO, James Quincey, has revealed that some of the biggest brands, including Sprite, Fanta and Dr Pepper, have all had their sugar content reduced - without affecting sales.
However, this comes on the heels of the soda giant's news last month that it will cut 1,200 corporate staff jobs this year after seeing drops in quarterly profit.
Coca-Cola has made several sugar content reductions over the last four years, including a 30 percent cut for orange soda Fanta two weeks ago, reported The Times. There were similar reductions in Sprite and Dr Pepper in 2013 and 2014.
The company has added sweeteners to try and maintain the same taste: Sprite has added stevia, a plant extract, while Fanta has gone with acesulfame, an artificial sweetener.
Fanta now contains less than half the sugar of Coca-Cola, the company's eponymous and most popular brand, at 4.6 grams per 100 milliliters - the equivalent of one teaspoon of sugar - compared to 10.8g.
Quincey told Bloomberg Businessweek that the changes have not significantly hit sales.
'We took some of the calories out of Sprite and consumers like Sprite now as much as they did before,' he said.
'Then we took 30 percent of the calories out of Fanta to see what would happen. Again, sales seem to be continuing fine.'
But researchers are telling a different story.
Barry Popkin of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Lynn Silver from the Public Health Institute in California conducted a before and after study of the prices, sales of beverages and consumer spending on fizzy pop in Berkeley, California.
They also worked out whether changes in prices of drinks reflect the tax amount in various stores.
Berkeley was the first US city to tax sugar-sweetened beverages, settling on a penny-per-ounce tax that went into effect in March 2015.
Popkin and Silver found that one year after the introduction of the tax, sales of sugary drinks fell by 9.6 percent while their sales in surrounding areas rose 6.9 percent.
Sales of water increased by 15.6 percent post-tax and sales for other non-taxed drinks such as unsweetened teas, milk and fruit juices also rose.
Residents of two low-income areas reported drinking 21 percent less of all sugar-sweetened beverages and 26 percent less soda than they had the year before.
Since then, several US cities have followed suit including San Francisco and Oakland, California; Boulder, Colorado; and Albany, New York - all of which passed sugar-sweetened beverage taxes in 2016.
And a sugar tax is due to hit the UK next year.
The new rules state that producers or importers of soft drinks will have to pay a 18 pence (23 cent) tax per liter on drinks containing five grams or more of sugar per 100ml.
The tax increases to 24 pence (31 cents) per liter more if the products contain eight grams or more per 100ml.
The Treasury expects the levy to raise £520million ($674million) a year.
Quincey suggested the size of bottles and cans containing Coca-Cola products may be reduced to help cut sugar consumption.
'If people are going to drink everything that's in front of them, well, when they've got a smaller package, they'll have less. That's the sort of thing moms like for kids,' he said
However, the soda giant revealed it would be cutting about 20 percent of its workforce - 1,200 jobs - as the company battles a drop in sales.
The cost-cutting target is expected to save Coca-Cola $3.8billion by 2019.
Global sales of Coke products fell by one percent for the first three months of 2017, and the company said said it expects full-year adjusted profits to drop by between one and three percent,
(C) dailymail.co.uk
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