Coca-Cola is changing The new graphic project says a lot about the direction the company is taking

Five years after its last rebranding, Coca-Cola has recently unveiled a new visual identity designed to make the brand more consistent and recognizable across the 200 countries where it operates. The project touches several graphic elements, including the font and the logo, right down to the packaging of Coca-Cola Zero – now increasingly aligned with that of the classic version and distinguishable only by a few details.

In its new look, Coca-Cola Zero adopts red bottles and cans very similar to those of the sugared version. What sets them apart is mainly the "Zero sugar" wording, now more prominent, and a few details, such as the bottle caps and the ribbon wrapping the packaging – both black. The move aims to make the historic elements of Coca-Cola's identity more consistent with one another, updating them to strengthen the brand's recognizability. These choices, beyond refreshing the brand's image, also reflect the direction the company is heading in – one increasingly focused on health.

Coca-Cola Zero vs Classic Coca-Cola 

For about a decade now, Coca-Cola Zero has been progressively converging, visually, with classic Coca-Cola. When it launched in 2005, in fact, it was conceived as an experimental product and used black in its packaging to set itself immediately apart from the original version. Its success, however, led the company to gradually reduce the presence of black, until it was relegated to just a few details on the packaging.

In essence, the two drinks have been made progressively more similar and both brought back to the white-and-red combination, so as to communicate the idea of a single product and put the brand at the center – rather than the presence or absence of sugar. As the American magazine Inc. notes, recent trends in the food and beverage industry, increasingly focused on health and product composition, have helped turn Coca-Cola Zero into the brand's flagship product, while classic Coca-Cola is increasingly perceived as a kind of "legacy" version.

Is Coca-Cola going healthy?

In recent years, Coca-Cola has tried to respond to growing demand for healthy drinks with products like Coca-Cola Plus, a zero-calorie, zero-sugar version marketed in the Japanese market and made famous on social media as "White Coke" – because of its packaging color. Its distinctive feature is the addition of 5 grams of indigestible dextrin (a soluble dietary fiber) per bottle, a formula that earned it the official FOSHU (Food for Specified Health Uses) certification in Japan, as it is indicated to help reduce fat absorption when consumed with meals.