Coke's latest mystery flavour is here. It’s created by AI
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For about a year and a half, Coca-Cola has experimented with limited-edition beverages that have mystery tastes — most of them with vague, futuristic concepts and undisclosed flavours.
For about a year and a half, Coca-Cola has experimented with limited-edition beverages that have mystery tastes — most of them with vague, futuristic concepts and undisclosed flavours.
The latest one, Coca-Cola Y3000, fits the bill. The one distinction: It's supposed to taste like the future. Fittingly, the soft-drink giant used artificial intelligence to help determine the flavour and packaging.
It's important for Coca-Cola to keep customers — particularly younger ones — excited about Coke, its more-than-a-century-old signature product. In recent years, health-conscious consumers have shied away from sugary beverages, making it trickier for soda sellers to market their legacy brands. Coca-Cola has used its Creations platform, responsible for limited-edition flavours like Y3000, to try to make the brand resonate with younger consumers.
Like all Creations drinks, Coca-Cola Y3000 is designed to taste mostly like Coke, with a bit of something else. To come up with that extra note of flavour, and the packaging design, Coca-Cola turned to AI.
The company relied on regular old human insights by finding out what flavours people associate with the future. Then it used AI to help figure out flavour pairings and profiles, a spokesperson said. For the product's packaging — which appears to allude to a Y2K aesthetic with funky bubbles, pink and blue colouring and a pixelated logo — Coca-Cola used AI-generated images to create a mood board for inspiration. The aluminum can even gives credit where it's due, prominently noting it's "Co-Created with AI."
Y3000, which comes in zero and full sugar varieties in the United States and Canada, will be sold for a limited time starting Tuesday and cost as much as regular Coke.
As with other flavours from Coca-Cola's Creations platform, Y3000 pairs online experiences with real-life events or merchandise. Customers can scan a QR code on the Y3000 package to reach the Creations site, where they can play around with what the future might look like in 977 years.
