Patio Diet Cola Ad – July 1963

Well, the weekend is here – and I'm thinking about pop. 

I pretty much avoid drinking it during the week so I can really enjoy it on the weekend. This whole ritual is probably a throwback to my youth, when the same rules applied.

Thus it's a good time for a post about pop – a favorite topic on this blog, as my regular readers know.

So here's an ad introducing a pop I'd never heard of: Patio Diet Cola. It ran in the Journal back on July 10, 1963. Patio Diet Cola was bottled by Pepsi-Cola. (The ad shows it being locally produced at 3209 Chester Avenue in Cleveland.)

The ad features Figure Expert Debbie Drake, once profiled in LIFE magazine as "America's First Female TV Fitness Guru."

It's a nice clean ad with a simple layout giving you a good look at the bottle (as well as Miss Drake). She also put out a fitness book in 1962.

But – you've never heard of Patio Diet Cola? That's because Patio Diet Cola was rebranded a year later as: Diet Pepsi! 

This article on BBC.com tells the whole story, how Pepsi was initially worried the product would fail and thus avoided rolling it out as a Pepsi variation. (Apparently Patio Diet Cola also figured prominently in a few episodes of Mad Men in its third season.)

This Wiki entry also provides a nice history of Patio Diet Cola and a few other products in the 'Patio' line.

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Do you refer to your favorite fizzy soft drink as pop – or soda pop? (I may have asked this before.) In our house when I was growing up, it was always 'pop' – as in, "Can we have pop tonight, Mom?"

I didn't know any other way of referring to it until I was living in the dorm at Ohio State and a fellow dorm-mate from New York said something like, "I could go for a soda." Immediately, I thought: "What kind? Chocolate? Vanilla?"

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So what's at 3209 Chester Avenue in Cleveland today? It doesn't look like any bottling is going on there today at The Venue at Chester. But it's easy to imagine that it once did there.