Lucozade Sales Drop After Unpopular Recipe Change

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Sales of Lucozade energy drink have slumped massively following a major change to their traditional recipe.

It seems fans of the sticky, orange, sugar-water aren’t pleased with the maker’s decision to reduce the amount of sugar in their energy drink – causing sales to drop by 8.4 percent year on year.

Lucozade has reportedly lost more than £25million worth of sales in the past year after they announced plans for a new recipe to try and avoid the government’s new sugar taxes.

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According to trade magazine The Grocer, the news of a slump comes 12 months after Lucozade’s chief operating officer, Peter Harding, revealed plans to reduce total sugar in its drinks to less than 4.5g, (a teaspoon), per 100ml.

At the time, Lucozade hailed their plans as game-changing and claimed customers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference because of ‘advances in sweeteners’ and how it would taste the same with less sugar.

Despite these bold claims, The Grocer reports the new recipe has been criticised on social media, with people heading to Twitter to let them know how ‘horrible’ they think the new taste is.

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As you can see people weren’t pleased:

In a statement Mr Harding said:

We expected to see some impact on Lucozade Energy sales. With any brand as well-loved as ours, some consumers will notice a recipe change.

We are delighted that 13 million shoppers have already converted to the new lower sugar recipe.

The overwhelming feedback from our extensive sampling campaign was hugely positive and we are seeing extra consumers buy into the category who previously might have disregarded energy drinks because of their higher sugar content.

Lucozade isn’t the only drinks company to mess with a classic formula – back in 1985 Coca-Cola updated their recipe producing New Coke – a sweeter tasting drink designed to compete with Pepsi.

The change went down pretty poorly with customers who demanded Coke switch back to their original recipe and following pressure from consumers, the fizzy drinks company eventually caved,  releasing original recipe coke once again.

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It’s not where the story ends though – according to conspiracy theorists, New Coke was designed to fail and was a marketing stunt to boost Coke sales – that or it was a clever cover, designed to mask the switch from Cane Sugar to high fructose corn syrup.

While these kind of make sense, it gets weirder, because of course it does – some believe the move was part of removing the last of the cocaine from Coke’s traditional recipe.

Who knows then? Maybe in a few month’s Lucozade will re-release Lucozade classic and we’ll all be happy again, while they’ll be happy there drink no longer contains LSD… we’re joking of course.

Tom Percival

More of a concept than a journalist, Tom Percival was forged in the bowels of Salford University from which he emerged grasping a Masters in journalism.

Since then his rise has been described by himself as ‘meteoric’ rising to the esteemed rank of Social Editor at UNILAD as well as working at the BBC, Manchester Evening News, and ITV.

He credits his success to three core techniques, name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake.