A Conversation with The People Who (Still) Love Tab

"That's our identity. There's no casual Tab drinkers."

I’ve never had the pleasure of drinking Tab. I wasn’t around for its heyday in the ’60s and ’70s, when it became popular as the first diet soda from Coca-Cola, and even as a devoted soda drinker with a fairly diverse palate, I had no idea that it was still in production until just a few years ago. It became harder to find over the decades: It didn’t get the advertising shine or widespread shelf placement of, say, Diet Coke. But Tab was still around, still an option for its diehard, holdout drinkers, until its discontinuation was announced in October 2020. That spelled disaster for those aforementioned diehard fans. But they refused to see it as defeat.

A group of them instead formed the SaveTabSoda Committee. They have set up a series of campaigns urging Coke to bring back their beloved Tab. But they have also set up something more—a support group, a friendship circle, a regular source of soda conversation. Tab was always more than a drink for them. And now it’s a form of community. It’s been nearly four years since they found each other on social media and formed their committee. They still meet roughly every other week to chat on Zoom.

The group was kind enough to let me join one of those meetings in March. I had a blast. Here’s that conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, for The Soda Fountain.

Some members of SaveTabSoda on their visit to World of Coca-Cola in 2023. Photo courtesy of SaveTabSoda.

Emma: Could you each go around and share your name, whatever identifying information you feel comfortable with, and your first memories of Tab?

Adam: I'm Adam Burbach. I'm in Nebraska. I first tried Tab when I was a little kid, and then Tab kind of disappeared when Diet Coke came out where I'm from, so I didn't see it again for a long time, other than on vacation… It showed up here again probably in 2018 or 2019, and so I was super excited when I saw Tab again and started buying it. And of course, it wasn't long after that it was discontinued. So I only got to enjoy it for a short while at the end there.

Trish: Trish Priest, I live in Seattle. I have no idea when I started drinking Tab—I don't remember not drinking Tab. And it became an international symbol for Trish here, when I go into meetings at work, because I would always have a Tab on my desk, or in front of me in the conference room where I was sitting. The company that I work for gives you free soda, but I would bring my own Tab. So, anyway, it's sort of been my identity, until they took it away.

Jenny: I'm Jenny Boyter. I'm in Atlanta, Georgia—I have no influence over Coke, even though they’re right here, but that's all right. I am retired, and when I retired, my staff gave me this big retirement party that was all Tab-themed. It was so great. Like, Tab pictures, they dressed from different eras of Tab and everything, it was hilarious. So definitely, like what Trish said, that's our identity. There's no casual Tab drinkers. Like, that's what you drink. If you drink Tab, you don't go, I mean, I'll have this or that. No. It's always Tab. And I look back in photographs—like, actual pictures—and I see I'll be at a party or wherever, and there's like some kind of Tab container in every picture. So it’s just always been with us.

Joseph: I started drinking Tab in the mid ‘70s, probably around the bicentennial, in 1976. I got it when I went with my father to the American Legion—they always had a refrigerator full of Tabs, which was kind of nice. They didn't have any other soft drinks, and they’d just have Tab, and I've been drinking it ever since. It's been really hard to find—outrageously hard to find. Sometimes, I would have to go three, four months without Tab, just because I couldn't find any in the stores. But I'm a comedian, and I’ve brought Tab to some of my shows, and people took pictures, and they ask me where did I get the Tab from, and they’ve even questioned if it was real. And I’m in Clovis, California.

Missie: My name is Missie Pierce. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, the home of Coca-Cola, but currently, I'm in Seattle visiting my son. So when Tab started going out—when they decided they weren't going to have it anymore—I drove all the way to Seattle to pick up about ten 12-packs. I have driven across the country looking for Tab. I guess I started drinking it when it first came out in Atlanta, and I’ve been drinking it ever since. I probably have about, oh, maybe eight cans left.

Emma: Those were some of the next questions I had. How you all reacted when you learned it had been discontinued, whether you tried to start hoarding, what that was like—and then what do you do with your remaining cans? Do any of the others here have any cans left?

Joseph: I have a 12-pack, and it’s stored in the refrigerator.

Jenny: Same, I have a 12-pack, and maybe, like, six cans. And I just drink them on a special occasion—if it's a birthday, or if it's New Year's Eve, or something like that. At first, I got a lot of Tab because my staff was really good, they’d find them in all these obscure places, and you know, Atlanta, I think we had more Tab [than other areas]. After a while, I couldn't find it, but they would find me some. So I had enough Tab. I drink—I did drink—one a day. So I think I had enough for a year and a half to two years, and I thought for sure, they would bring it back by then. So then I started slowing down when I only had a few 12-packs left. So it's very sad. I don't want to get to the last one.

Adam: I have probably 8 to 10 cans left in the refrigerator. I don’t drink them very often—it's been months since I've had one.

Trish: I have three cans left in the refrigerator that I don't really intend to ever drink. I just want to keep them for posterity. I have a ton of empty cans and empty 12-packs that I've hoarded for mementos, or, I don't know what. Once they announced it was gone, I hoarded, but in Seattle, they don't have a lot out. So I was buying it on eBay, and my max price was what I would pay for a very nice bottle of wine, so I was paying up to $100 for a 12-pack.

Emma: So no one’s had the experience of drinking their final one? Everyone still has a little bit left in their stash?

Trish: I drank the last one I’m going to drink until it comes back.

Emma: Was that a special occasion?

Trish: This is the can. [Holds up Tab.] It’s on my desk. It was my birthday.

Emma: Oh, that’s really beautiful.

Trish with some of her Tab gear: The pin is from the 1984 LA Olympics! Photo courtesy of Trish Priest.

Missie: When my husband and I used to travel, when you could carry just about anything on the plane with you, his job was to carry one can per day for every day we were going to be gone. So that I could still have my one can a day. I got pretty snarly when I didn't get my one can a day.

Emma: Sounds like a very good husband to come prepared like that.

Adam: And all of us in 2023, we all went to Atlanta and got fresh Tab at World of Coca-Cola. So they had it on the fountain in their tasting room, and we all got a private tour of World of Coca-Cola, and then at the very end of it, we all kind of lined up in front of the Tab fountain and had our fill of Tab.

Emma: Oh, that must have been so special. Which was another one of the things that stood out to me here—that, you know, it sounds like this isn't just sharing some emails, it feels like you've really built a community here, where you're talking about it regularly. What has it been like to build that and to find each other?

Missie: We started out looking for each other, and once you started making comments, if you found somebody with a big cabinet full of Tab, you just had to answer them back and commiserate that we couldn't find it anymore.

Trish: I thought that I was a big fan until I went on to Facebook and found other Tab drinkers. And I was not even close to the max as a fan, and I mean, I had people calling me and giving me condolences when it was discontinued.

Jenny: Same. I got an email that said, I'm sorry for your loss. Like, oh, that's what it felt like. I just really kept thinking they were going to bring it back, bring it back, it's not going to be that long. As soon as I went online, like, What am I going to do? I found Adam and Save Tab Soda, and he had all these things we could do, people we could write to, and I was like, this is great, I’m all about it. So we've been at it ever since.

Emma: Yeah, Adam, it seems like you’ve been remarkably organized in how you've approached this. Is this something you have experience with professionally, running campaigns like this? Or it’s just come naturally?

Adam: Not really. I mean, I’m a product manager, so I work with stakeholders and different people and executives and that sort of thing. But I’ve never really done anything like this before. I think for me, when I saw the press release that it was going to be discontinued, like everybody else, I went online. I was like, There's got to be other people that are upset about this, right? And so I found Facebook, and I saw all these people that were like, It's going away. What are we going to do? And so I just thought—wouldn't it be nice if we just kind of organized ourselves a little bit, instead of a bunch of people that are going, I don't know what to do? Let’s get a group together to figure out what we’re going to do. And so I got the SaveTabSoda domain, and I scheduled a Zoom call, this is back in 2020. I think Trish and Jenny were on it, and we had a group of people that joined and said, What should we do about this? And the rest is kind of history. We've been meeting regularly ever since then as we kind of plan our different events.

When the group visited World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, they all met for a Tab-themed party at Jenny’s house, complete with Tab cookies and Tab decor. (Missy brought a 12-pack.) They drew a dozen Tab lovers from all over the country.

Emma: Going off of that, what is it about Tab that you think inspires this kind of love and passion? You're having people on these Zooms every month for it, years after it's been out of production, and you're traveling across the country for it. What is it about Tab?

Missie: The unique taste.

Adam: There’s nothing else like it.

Jenny: We’ve tried all different sodas and everything. Just nothing tastes like it at all. When you get to taste it, you're gonna love it, you are. It's a strong taste, but not—it's just, I don't know, there's just something about it that's just so delicious. And even when I drink it, a two-year-old can that’s expired, it still tastes better than anything I've been buying just to have a soda.

Trish: It's also the only soda that has saccharin as the main sweetener, which I love. I think the other thing is that we all started—or at least a lot of us started—when it was the only diet soda, the only diet cola, out there. Before Diet Coke. And we got attached to it, and then Diet Coke came out, and it’s not the same.

Jenny: It’s terrible, actually. I'll never forget the first time I drank a Diet Coke. I've probably told everybody the story—we were at a party, and of course, I'm drinking Tab in there, and somebody had a Diet Coke, and I'm like, something new, you know? And it tasted to me like if you had a regular Coke with ice in it and the ice melted. That’s what Diet Coke tastes like. I was like, This is terrible. I felt bad for Coke, because I was like—are they going to sell this stuff? It’s awful! And here’s Tab, this tangy, zesty amazing taste, and then this terrible thing. But they pushed it, they advertised it, and people bought it, and they didn’t put Tab out there. So there was nothing else for people to drink, and they were like, Okay, I guess I’m a Diet Coke drinker. I don’t know. It’s very sad.

Missie: Many of our group call Coke on a daily basis to tell them to please bring it back. And bless his heart, my husband has even been making phone calls, too. So we have two a day that we make.

The group has written open letters to Coca-Cola, done surveys to measure how much people might buy if they only had the chance, and installed billboards around Atlanta. “We kind of started off with, like, ‘Let's just tell them we're out here, there's a lot of us, we want it back,’ and we've kind of morphed that a little bit into, ‘There's a valid business reason for bringing Tab back,’” Adam says. “There's an untapped market.” There have been a few hints of promise: Coke still makes Tab merch (including a jacket included by the brand in a recent giveaway) and featured the soda in a commercial that aired during the Super Bowl. Last year, Coke CEO James Quincey mentioned how often he’s asked to revive Tab in an interview on CNBC. “It seems like they’ve opened the door to the idea,” Adam says. They hope their campaigns might help push it through.

Emma: When you were talking about your stashes—for those of you who have it in your fridge, is it like in the back of the fridge, or is it something you see every time you open it? Does it feel sad to see it there, or is it more of a sense of happiness that it's still there, even if it's just a few cans?

Jenny: It’s comforting. I have it in a downstairs refrigerator, so I don’t see it all the time, it’s for my extra stuff, but—it’s sort of both. Comforting, I still have it, but also, I want to have more.

Missie: Mine's in the back of the fridge, so that only I know that it's there. My grandchildren don't get it.

Joseph: I have mine with other discontinued sodas like Sierra Mist and Hires Root Beer.

Adam: I’m kind of like Jenny, I've got a second refrigerator downstairs, and I just keep soda in there, and, you know, extra stuff in the freezer, so I've got a row of Tab next to all of the other sodas that I drink.

Emma: I like to think that I would like it. Hopefully, I get a chance to find out.

Jenny: I hope so, too. You would.

Missie with her original stash of Tab. Photo courtesy of Missie Pierce.