Free The Wise Book of Whys by Daven Hiskey, Today I Found Out.com Page A

shown to be ten times more effective at repelling mosquitoes than DEET (N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide), which is the chemical traditionally used in mosquito repellant. However, it should be noted that when put on human skin, nepetalactone’s effectiveness as a mosquito repellant decreases drastically, so it’s more suitable as a mosquito repellent when sprayed on clothing or the like.
     

 
    Why Coke Tried to Switch to “New Coke”
     
    It turns out there was actually (if you squint at the problem hard enough), a semi-good reason for making the switch. It didn’t work out, of course… But then, it kind of did work out amazingly well at the same time, as you’ll soon see.
    Now, before I get into the real reason for the switch, let me debunk the conspiracy theory that Coca-Cola was trying to swindle people into accepting high fructose corn syrup over sugar in their drink by pulling the New Coke stunt. The truth of the matter is that they’d already allowed bottlers to use high fructose corn syrup in Coke for about five years before they introduced New Coke (before they even thought up the idea to make a New Coke).
    Most bottlers made the switch pretty quickly because of the drastic cost savings. Initially, Coca-Cola allowed a 50% corn syrup substitution and by about 6 months before the introduction of New Coke, nearly every major bottler of Coca-Cola was using 100% high fructose corn syrup, rather than sugar or a mixture of the two. So those who claimed they could taste a difference because of the high fructose corn syrup after the return of the old Coca-Cola, actually had already been drinking it with high fructose corn syrup, in most cases long before New Coke.
    Coca-Cola did consider not announcing that they were switching to New Coke, with a plan to just very gradually change the flavor. But they ended up deciding that it was too risky, because if someone noticed, it might become a huge news story and hurt sales from the bad publicity of trying to trick their customers.
    So what really was the motivation for switching to New Coke? Coke had steadily been losing ground to Pepsi and by the early 1980s, taste tests done by Coca-Cola and Pepsi showed that most people tested preferred Pepsi over Coke. Further, if not for Coke’s exclusive contracts with many restaurants and vending machine vendors, Pepsi would have been drastically outselling Coke, as it was in supermarkets and other locations where people had a choice.
    Coca-Cola, thus, set about changing their formula to come up with something people would prefer over the original Coke and Pepsi. Specifically, they created New Coke based on their Diet Coke formula. Diet Coke was extremely popular right from its debut (rocketing up to the third most popular cola after Pepsi and Coke within just a few years of its launch), even though it was a new flavor and not based on regular Coke, as the name seems to imply.
    Thus, as taste tests showed that more people preferred the taste of Diet Coke to regular Coke, they decided to primarily just take out the artificial sweeteners in Diet Coke and substituted in high fructose corn syrup. With a few more minor modifications, they succeeded in creating a new apparently tasty drink.
    This wasn’t a case of them not doing their due diligence on whether it was better than the original Coca-Cola. They knew full well how big of a thing it would be to abandon their old formulation. As such, they ran numerous tests that showed the vast majority of people preferred the new formulation over the old and it also beat out Pepsi by a decent margin.
    What went wrong is still partially up for debate, but the heart of the issue is basically the “nostalgia” factor and that they’d spent nearly a century marketing their product as something you can’t live without, then they took it away. People had apparently taken this message to heart. While the taste tests made New Coke look great, they never explicitly asked the question in any of their tests