Shopper Tastes a Can of Dr Pepper and Felt Something Was ‘Off’ — Then, They Checked the Label

In 1985, a leviathan Godzilla stepped onto the street and got out of control. Before it crushed and squashed the city under its jumbo paws, Dr Pepper materialized out of smoky air, as seen in this commercial. The pepper-flavored soda pop has been tickling the taste buds since the 1980s. It is “just what the doctor ordered." The doctor's soda was sweet, spicy, and everything nice. But when Reddit user u/areebazm, an “avid Dr Pepper drinker,” opened her can of Dr Pepper, the taste puzzled her. Then she checked the ingredients label.

The user had purchased a 24-pack of 12 fluid ounce cans of Dr Pepper Soda Pop. To their disappointment, the beverage in these cans didn’t taste like its usual. “Bad Batch of Dr Pepper,” they wrote in the post caption. They couldn’t guess why the soda was off-putting until they flipped the can and checked out the ingredients label. Turned out that the drink missed a crucial ingredient that likely contributed to the sweet flavor. “Right when I had it, I knew it tasted off, but I wasn't sure why. I thought I was head casing until I had my brother-in-law try it, and he said it tastes watered down. That's when I thought to check the ingredients, and bro, they haven’t got high fructose corn syrup! Actually wild,” the user explained in the post.

Dr Pepper is a carbonated soft drink marketed in North America and South America by Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages (CSAB), a unit of Cadbury Schweppes. PapersOwl describes that the popularity of this beverage is usually attributed to its unique blend of 23 flavors, whose recipe is a closely guarded secret, just like the Coca-Cola recipe. The special recipe was invented when a man was inspired by the aromatic medley of a soda fountain and decided to replicate it into a drink. The stark love for this soda is the very reason why this shopper was taken aback after they chugged down a can and read the ingredients, which mentioned “Sugars (sugar/glucose-fructose).”

In a comment, they shared that just before they started this batch, they had just finished a 12-pack batch they bought from Walmart. That batch tastes pretty different and perfect. “I am definitely being a little overdramatic, but man, I love my Dr Pepper,” they exclaimed while describing that the sodas in this batch tasted “less carbonated and not like normal Dr Pepper at all.”

The doubt was triggered in the shopper’s mind because typically, Dr Pepper is known to use high-fructose corn syrup in its US version cans. According to Chem Europe, much of the soft drink industry in the United States stopped using sugar in the 1980s, due to rising sugar prices. As a result, most U.S. soft drinks, including Dr Pepper, now use high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) instead of sugar. So it was unlikely to find this essential sweetening ingredient missing from the label.

Reddit users who came across this post speculated that the issue lay not in Dr Pepper but in the version of it. They noted that Canada’s version of Dr Pepper sodas is far better and sweetened than the US versions. Although people pointed out that “glucose/fructose” combined is the same thing as HFCS, the taste didn’t seem to match this equation. “I like this version better. I always load up on it when I go to Canada,” wrote u/Different-Language-5. The Dr Pepper fan agreed that they, too, like Canada’s version “a tad bit better.”