system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How can a candy company (Jelly Belly) create flavors that taste like baby wipes, skunk smell, grass, etc., yet the major soda companies cannot create a diet soda that tastes EXACTLY like the original?

Ok, I will say that Diet Dr. Pepper is very close.

Good lord! Did not expect to hit the front page. And now I understand when people say their inbox blew up! Thank you for all the explanations, though. Now someone can do a TIL ...
gpt
You're looking at two different things - artificial flavorings & artificial sweeteners.  Artificial flavors trick our nose into sensing some other food product & are relatively easy to come up with.  Artificial sweeteners trick our body into sensing *sugar*, something that's fundamentally essential to animal survival.

Coming up with an artificial flavor is usually just a matter of finding the chemical that's responsible for most of the scent of something & figuring out how to make it synthetically.  Coming up with an artificial sweetener means finding a molecule that can trick the *very* specialized sensors on our tongue into thinking "sugar".

Nobody's been able to come up with a 0-calorie sweetener that actually tastes like sugar.

So, when you're mixing a diet soda, you can't just substitute your artificial sweetener for sugar because **it tastes wrong**.  You need to change the flavors a bit to compensate for how artificial it tastes.

**Edit:** thanks for the gold!