Because sweet isn't good enough....

Yet another reason to put down that soda. "Pepsi's next major cola product looks to be a still-secret "mid-calorie" soda, with sixty percent less sugar than a regular can of Pepsi, but that still tastes exactly the same as the real thing. The secret? Flavor enhancements. "Biotech products that are not sweet themselves, but increase the intensity of sweeteners," so it tastes like real sugar."

If sweeter isn't enough, salt-ier is also a goal for the soft drink company.  "Pepsi's custom-designed a new type of type salt—"15 micron salt"—whose molecular structure is designed expressly to taste saltier (maintaining the "taste curve"), allowing Pepsi to douse Lay's potato chips with less sodium, while delivering the same salty kick. (Fun fact: You only taste about 20-25 percent of the salt on the chips. And no one knows how salt really works.) It's going to show up on Lay's in 2012." via The Future of Salt and Sugar Is Being Engineered in a PepsiCo Lab.