The Forgotten '60s Soda That Led To The Creation Of Diet Pepsi

Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke have spent more than 60 years as the reigning heavyweights of the sugar-free cola aisle, trading market share back and forth while nearly every other diet soda fell by the wayside. But Diet Pepsi wasn't built from scratch. It grew out of a soda called Patio, a drink most people today have never tasted, or even heard of.

Pepsi rolled out Patio Cola in 1963 as its first real attempt at a diet soft drink, with flavors well beyond the standard cola, like root beer and tropical fruits, along with oddities like ginger ale and tonic water. The marketing aimed almost entirely at women: Debbie Drake fronted a series of ads linking the drink to diet and exercise. Pepsi tested the campaign in Greenville, South Carolina, the same city that had already shown Diet Rite could turn a diet cola into a real seller.

Fans of Mad Men may recognize the name: Patio was a Sterling Cooper client in the show's third season, right down to a pitch meeting gone wrong over a Bye Bye Birdie-inspired ad.

Diet soda as a category traces back to a Brooklyn hospital, where Hyman and Morris Kirsch created a drink called No-Cal in 1952 for diabetic and cardiovascular patients at the Jewish Sanitarium for Chronic Disease. Most of No-Cal's buyers, however, weren't diabetic at all — they simply wanted to cut calories. Royal Crown took note and launched Diet Rite in 1962, and diet soda sales climbed fast. Pepsi needed an answer, and Patio was it.

Patio never caught up to Diet Rite. Pepsi's bottlers treated it as an afterthought alongside their flagship cola, and by the mid-1960s, it was stuck trading places with Coca-Cola's TaB rather than pulling ahead. Donald Kendall, then Pepsi's CEO, saw a simpler problem: the company was splitting its ad budget across two colas it could barely support separately. He piloted a merger of the two brands in Detroit and Louisville, Kentucky, watching bottle returns roll in as proof the idea was working. Patio became Diet Pepsi in 1964 and was consigned to the list of discontinued drinks a few short years later.

Kendall's bet paid off, reshaping how the industry thought about diet sodas. Coca-Cola, seeing how people rally around the "Diet" brand when it's attached to a name they already know and love, took the strategy for a spin in 1982 as well and launched Diet Coke.  It did not replace TaB; instead, it was in addition to TaB — Coca-Cola's independent diet brand. Fun fact: unlike the long-gone Patio, TaB was phased out only recently in 2020. So yes, even if you're on Team Red, you've got (partly) Patio and Diet Pepsi to thank!