Pepsi Zero Sugar

Pepsi Zero Sugar, also known as Pepsi Max and Pepsi Black, is a low-calorie, sugar-free cola, marketed by PepsiCo. A diet soda soft drink, it was first released in 1993 as an alternative to the company's Diet Pepsi and has been widely available since.

Pepsi Zero Sugar aims to mimic the taste of Pepsi using a blend of acesulfame potassium and aspartame artificial sweeteners instead of sugar, with small variations depending on region.

Pepsi-Cola International spent three years developing the product with the aim to create a sugar-free drink but tasting indistinguishable from regular Pepsi. The product aimed to target those who chose not to consume Diet Pepsi because of, what they would consider to be, an inferior taste and image.

It was officially announced on March 2, 1993 and initially called Pepsi Max. It was launched to test markets in Great Britain and Italy starting in April. The rollout was expanded to other countries in Europe and Australia and it was successful, becoming a permanent offering and availability growing to close to twenty countries by 1994. However the product remained unavailable in the United States (PepsiCo's home market, and the largest consumer of carbonated soft drinks), where one of its principal ingredients had not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The ingredient—acesulfame potassium ("Ace-K")—is combined with aspartame to provide the beverage's sweetness, whereas some other diet colas are sweetened by aspartame alone.

Beginning in early 1994, an entirely different Pepsi Max was marketed in Canada because of strict local laws regarding artificial sweeteners. This was the only Pepsi Max product to contain sugar. It was sweetened with a combination of aspartame and high fructose corn syrup. As a result, it contained two-thirds fewer calories than full-sugar colas (including regular Pepsi), but more calories than conventional diet/light colas (or the version of Pepsi Max sold elsewhere). The Canadian product was discontinued in 2002.^{[citation needed]} Pepsi-Cola North America later introduced another "mid-calorie" drink called Pepsi Edge to compete against Coca-Cola C2 (both became failures), but has no direct relationship to the earlier Canadian Max formulation.

In 1998, after the American FDA approved acesulfame potassium, the company introduced Pepsi One for the North American market. This new variety contained the same sweeteners as Pepsi Max, but not an identical formula or flavor. In 2005, Pepsi One was revised, with Splenda brand sucralose replacing the aspartame ingredient. Diet Pepsi Max was introduced in the United States and Canada in 2007 and 2008 respectively. This drink had the same sweeteners as Pepsi Max in other countries but had additional ginseng and caffeine. It was later renamed to simply Pepsi Zero Sugar.

Pepsi began making new flavored variants of the drink beginning in 2004, such as Pepsi Max Lemon and Pepsi Max Twist (with added lemon-lime flavour) in some countries' product lines.

Diet Pepsi Max was introduced in the United States on June 1, 2007, and in Canada in March 2008. "Diet" was dropped from the name in early 2009.