NEW YORK -- U.S. sales of Diet Coke overtook those of Pepsi-Cola for the first time ever in 2010, making the diet soda the No. 2 carbonated soft drink in the country behind Coca-Cola, according to data released by trade journal Beverage Digest.
Last year, sales of Coca-Cola and Diet Coke were flat, which was good enough to unseat Pepsi-Cola from the No. 2 spot, as its share dropped 0.6 percentage point, according to the data.
Occupying the top two rankings marks a historic win for Coca-Cola Co. in its decades-old rivalry with PepsiCo Inc., which has seen [image-nocss] its market share slip in recent years and is trying to retool its marketing, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Pepsi-Cola commanded only a slight lead over Diet Coke in 2009, when each brand had slightly less than a 10% market share among carbonated soft drinks. That year, regular Coke won the cola wars with a 17% market share, according to Beverage Digest.
In 2010, Coca-Cola's market share in U.S. soft drinks inched up 0.1 percentage point to 42.0%, while PepsiCo's share dropped 0.6 percentage point to 29.3%. The market share of the No. 3 player, Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc., rose 0.3 percentage point to 16.7%.
Among top individual brands, regular Coke boasted a 17% share, unchanged from 2009, and Diet Coke had a 9.9% share, also unchanged from 2009. Pepsi-Cola lost 0.4 percentage point to drop to No. 3 with a 9.5% share.
PepsiCo's Mountain Dew had the fourth-largest share, inching 0.1% higher to 6.8%, followed by Dr Pepper, which gained 0.2 percentage point to 6.3%.
"We're not happy. We would obviously like to be No. 1," Massimo d'Amore, chief executive of PepsiCo Beverages Americas, told the Los Angeles Times. "We want to reclaim the place that belongs to this company."
The overall soft-drinks category shrank for the sixth straight year, although the decline was less dramatic than in 2009. Texas-based Dr Pepper Snapple Group and Coca-Cola both gained market share, while PepsiCo lost it.
With the volume declines of the last six years, the category's volume is back down to about where it was in 1996, eliminating years of growth, Beverage Digest said, according to published reports. The industry grew roughly 3% a year in the 1990s before starting to decline in 2005.
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