Michael Berry Show is on the air.

Today's Michael Berry Show is sponsored by TAB.

TAB was created by Coca-Cola in 1963 following the success of Diet Right

Cola which was owned by the Royal Crown Company and was the only sugarless soda on the market at the time.

Tab went after consumers who wanted to keep tabs on their weight.

Coca-Cola's marketing team used an IBM 1401 super computer to generate a list of over 180,000

four letter words with just one vowel.

It filtered out words that were hard to say and those too similar to existing trademarks.

Whittle in that list down to just about 20 names. Tabbovah was chosen, likely for its

catchy play on words, but later the name was shortened to just Tab.

Over the years, Tab's formula went through several changes.

Initially, it was just sweetened with a mix of sacramate.

However, when the FDA banned cyclimate in 1969,

TAB relied solely on sacrin. In the early 1970s, studies linked high volumes of cyclimate in sacrin to bladder cancer in rats.

This led to Congress mandating warning labels on products containing sacron noting its potential cancer risk.

Despite the controversy, TAB remained popular and was the best-selling diet soda in 1982.

TAB's popularity started to wane with the introduction of Diet Coke the same year, although it

maintained a cult following. But things changed in 1984, when Coca-Cola introduced

Nutri-sweet into the tab formula.

This alteration didn't sit well with many loyal consumers,

leading to numerous complaints about the new taste.

And by 2011, Coca-Cola reported producing around 3 million cases of tab compared to 885

...