Going Kosher for Passover and Other Sweet Ideas

With seder just around the corner, kosher food and drink stories have been hitting the wires with increasing force of late. And although I’ve enjoyed several different articles outlining various interpretations of the modern seder dinner (including a good bit in Wednesday’s issue of the Chicago Tribune covering a seder feast celebrating Italian Jewry) along with other Passover topics, one that particularly caught my eye—for a number of reasons—focused on “Kosher for Passover” Coke, which is sweetened with sucrose rather than high-fructose corn syrup (evidently, HFCS, due to its corny history, is not permitted during Passover).

Those of you over the age of 30 might recall that The Coca-Cola Company swapped sugar for HFCS back in 1985 with the reintroduction of Coke as Classic Coke (after that carefully planned New Coke bait-and-switch bit—uh, I mean product-development fiasco…), and some die-hard Coke fans claim the soda has never been the same—except at Passover when the company releases a limited supply of “Kosher for Passover” Coke, which evidently is quite a hit around this time of year, for Jews and non-Jews alike. The stuff sells out within 24 hours in some metropolitan areas…

A couple of months back, I was in Scottsdale for our company’s annual Focus on the Future event, and Peter van Stolk, founder and CEO of Jones Soda, was sitting in on a beverage panel. During one of the discussions, he mentioned that he was switching his products from HFCS to cane sugar, quipping (and he’s quite a rapid-fire quipper): “Corn is for cars. Sugar is for soda.” (Knowing van Stolk, he probably has kids hired per diem across the nation—when they’re not working on Ted Turner’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force ad campaigns—graffito tagging that slogan on subway walls as part of his guerilla-marketing campaign.)

Sweetener choice is a hot topic these days as the ingredient statements that grace our food labels face increasing scrutiny (for a number of reasons—like ghostly health perceptions (although glycemic impact might be a valid point for some…) and more reality-driven points like the big ethanol push—but those are entirely different subjects for another day…). And when developing new or reformulating beverage lines these days, it certainly makes sense to carefully consider your sweeteners.