The Coca-Cola Blunder

From Quora, by Joe Brown

Coca-Cola is really taking a beating in these answers, but we should never forget the disasterous “MagiCan” scandal of the early 90s. *

You know how you get a little prize in cereal boxes? Well Coke wanted to include prizes like that in cans of its soda. They invented a little spring-loaded device that would pop out the prize when the can was opened.

But this had a problem: it made the can feel half-empty, because, well, it was. So they added water to the mechanism to make the can approximately the same weight as a normal one.

But the water presented another problem: it greatly increased the likelihood of bacteria invading the drink. So they chlorinated it.

But of course, if there’s some kind of failure, you don’t want to be drinking chlorinated cola, and Coke didn’t want people to think there was something wrong with the cola itself.

So they added ammonium sulfate to the water, which is the chemical responsible for the rotten-egg stink. That way, if there was a failure, you’d know immediately and not drink from that can. (That was the theory, anyway; most of the customers didn’t get the memo.)

Failures, unfortunately, happened quite often. Many people complained that their prize was soaked and stinking. Other people reported that their Coke smelled awful and tasted worse, unaware that there was supposed to have been a prize inside, because the mechanism failed to activate altogether.

Worse, people who got the defective cans became terrified at the strange odor and foreign object floating in their drink, thinking it had been tampered with and poisoned by some nefarious criminal. People checked themselves into the hospital, and rumors grew the Coke wasn’t safe to drink. This, of course, got blown way out of proportion very, very quickly.

Somehow Coca-Cola had decided not to mark the MagiCans in any way whatsoever. They just looked like normal cans. This series of massive miscalculations and misjudgements was a $100 million campaign that was quietly ended after three weeks because the MagiCan confused and frightened so many customers. Talk about a blunder.

* That Time Coca-Cola Spent $100 Million Intentionally Filling Coke Cans With Water That Smelled Like Farts