For decades, Diet Coke has been a durable pop culture icon, as much a symbol of boardroom swashbuckling as high fashion society. Its buzzy 1980s origins featured endorsements from celebrities including Paula Abdul, Whitney Houston and Demi Moore. More recently, limited-edition Diet Coke cans were released to coincide with “The Devil Wears Prada” sequel.
The soda is also beloved across generations. It has been given the mantle of “fridge cigarette” by a Gen Z cohort who, according to Cosmopolitan, want to “blow off steam without the actual fumes” and is repped by quintessential baby boomers, including Bill Gates in a TikTok he posted of himself re-creating Warren Buffett’s recipe for Dusty Diet Coke. (That’s a bizarro mix of the soda, vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup and malted milk powder.)
Even the magic button that summons Diet Cokes to the Oval Office reappeared on the Resolute Desk last January, much to the irritation of the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
All of this soft-drink soft power belies an uneasy truth for Diet Coke fanatics. The diet soda sweeping the nation is actually the beverage’s own sibling, Coke Zero Sugar—part of a zero-sugar soda boom that accounted for 52% of growth in soft drink sales last year, according to the market research firm Circana. Sales of Diet Coke, by comparison, have been, well, pretty flat since the soda peaked in popularity in 2006.
In January, President Trump reinstalled a button on the Oval Office Resolute Desk (right) that summons Diet Cokes. Chip Somodevilla/
As Coke Zero gets bigger, and threatens to dethrone “DC” as the most important diet soda property in the Coca-Cola extended universe, the feud between Diet Coke fans and Coke Zero drinkers is getting pretty fizzy.
