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Top 10 Discontinued Soda Drinks We Miss (Part 4)
In the grand scheme of things, a food item getting discontinued is barely worth noticing. It’s not exactly Earth-shattering. But that rational perspective doesn’t make it suck any less when you find out one of your favorite foods is no more. No food item is safe from discontinuation, but some products are more at risk than others. We’re just cycling through cereals and candies at this point. Another food item that keeps getting discontinued left, right and center is the soft drink. We don’t know what it is about sodas, but their producers seem to get bored of them real fast. Here are ten examples of soft drinks you’ll never drink again.
10. Pepsi Tropical Chill
While the classic Pepsi will never die, some of the brand’s flavored beverages haven’t quite achieved that level of staying power. In the 1990s, Pepsi released three fruity sodas to test markets. Unfortunately, none of them managed to make it through their trial runs and they were never officially released. These three soft drinks were the perfect refreshing drink on a hot summer’s day. The flavors were Strawberry Burst, Raging Razzberry (which apparently didn’t taste much like raspberry), and, our favourite, Tropical Chill. Tropical Chill had a tropical fruit punch flavor that has, sadly, not received the love it deserves. We can’t say for sure which fruits gave this soda it’s incredible flavor, but the pictures on the can hint that there was some pineapple and either orange or grapefruit in there. Not your typical soft drinks flavors, but it worked. If you’ve never heard of Pepsi Tropical Chill, it’s probably because it didn’t stick around for very long. It was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it situation. It’s too bad, because if more people had known about this soda it might’ve become a real hit. Oh, well. No use crying over spilled milk – or discontinued soft drinks.
9. Coca-Cola C2
Just like Pepsi, Coca-Cola has more than a few variations that you’ve probably never heard of. This one appeared in the early 2000s and disappeared just three years later. Coca-Cola C2 first launched in Japan but made its way to North America not long after. At the time, low-carb diets were all the rage and, unsurprisingly, many companies were jumping on the bandwagon. Coca-Cola C2’s gimmick was that it contained half the carbs, sugars, and calories of your average Coca-Cola. Basically, it fell half-way between a regular Coke and a Diet Coke. Unfortunately, Coca-Cola C2 kind of flopped. If one thing’s for sure, this soda’s failure had nothing to do with its marketing – the soundtracks of commercials for Coca-Cola C2 included Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” and The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. So, this soft drink gets full marks for advertising. The main reason behind the soda’s lack of sales was that people just weren’t all that into the idea. Customers either committed to the full sugar, full calorie Coca-Cola, or went completely in the other direction and opted for Coca-Cola Zero, which was released just one year after Coca-Cola C2. There wasn’t really much of a market for this half-sweet soda, and it slowly faded into the background.
8. Mountain Dew Ultraviolet
One of Mountain Dew’s many, many variations, Mountain Dew Ultraviolet, was sold for two limited runs around 2010. It’s a milestone in Mountain Dew history, as it was the first of their soda to be available only in diet form. This purple soda was named for its color, and its flavor was labeled as Mixed Berry. The people who were lucky enough to get the chance to try Mountain Dew Ultraviolet during its very short runs enjoyed it but noted that it tasted almost identical to Mountain Dew Revolution, which was a Wild Berry Fruit flavored soda. Since Revolution was full-sugar and full-calorie, some people considered it to be the non-diet version of Ultraviolet. If you’re thinking that Revolution could make up for the fact that Ultraviolet was discontinued and act as a substitute for it… well, good try, but no dice. Revolution was discontinued around the same time as Ultraviolet. But don’t worry. There are still dozens of Mountain Dew variations out there for you to try, and they’re always coming out with new flavors. And always remember to keep an eye out, because Mountain Dew will often bring back discontinued flavors for limited runs. Who knows, maybe Ultraviolet (or Revolution) will be next!
7. Snapple Tru Root Beer
Before Snapple fully committed to fruit juice and iced tea, they had a full soda line-up. Their range of soft drinks included some pretty interesting flavors, including Cherry Lime Rickey, Crème d’Vanilla, Diet Lemon Lime, French Cherry, Ginger Ale, Jamaican Ginger Beer, and, today’s main focus, Tru Root Beer. True to its name, Snapple’s Tru Root Beer fully captured that signature Root Beer flavor. It wasn’t as sweet as most other Root Beers, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, since the most common complaint people have about Root Beer is that they find it too sweet. Tru Root Beer and Snapple’s other soft drinks made their debut in the early eighties. They were discontinued before the end of the decade, in part due to the company’s shift to juice and iced tea. This is one of those foods that people get deeply nostalgic over. It also has a huge fanbase. Unlike the previous entries on this list, Snapple Tru Root Beer was around for quite a while, meaning that a lot of people had the chance to try it and fall in love with it. The longer a food item is around, the harder it is to say goodbye when it’s discontinued.
6. Tahitian Treat
Even if you weren’t around when Tahitian Treat was sold, if you’re a Drake fan, you’ve probably heard of this soft drink from the nineties. He references if in his song Weston Road Flows, with the lyrics “I used to hit the corner store to get to Tahiti Treat.” Turns out this star is a nineties kid like any other. This popular soda was produced by Canada Dry in Canada and Dr. Pepper in the USA. Tahitian Treat was fruit punch flavored and easily recognized by its bright red color. It was never officially discontinued, but, over the past thirty or so years, it’s gone from mainstream to nearly impossible to find. If you asked any Millennial about this fruit punch soda, there’s a good chance they’d remember it, but if you mentioned it to someone in Gen Z, they’d probably just be confused. All that to say, even though it seems to have disappeared, it’s possible that you might come across it when you least expect it.
5. Hubba Bubba Soda
While chewing on a piece of Hubba Bubba (everyone’s favorite bubble gum), have you ever thought, “this is great, but it’d be much better if I could drink this”? You probably haven’t. However, if you’d had that thought in the late eighties, you could have made it a reality. For the last few years of the decade, the famous bubble gum was given a soft drink counterpart. As you can probably tell by how quickly its production was cancelled, Hubba Bubba Soda wasn’t exactly a hit. The packaging of this soda was spectacular. Both the regular and diet versions of the soda came in cute white and pink cans decorated with bubbles. The name of the soda was written on the can in yellow bubble letters. Even the soda itself was a very aesthetically pleasing shade of light pink. The entire design screamed the eighties. Hubba Bubba Soda was first created using bubble gum flavored snow cone syrup – which sounds sweet enough to cause cavities within seconds. If you don’t consider yourself to have a sweet tooth, this soda probably isn’t for you. By most accounts, Hubba Bubba Soda wasn’t all that great. But it’s such an interesting concept that we can’t help wanting to try it. You know, for science. It’s too bad that we’ll never get the chance.
4. Red Fusion
Dr. Pepper’s release of their Red Fusion soda in the early 2000s was a historic moment, as it was the first time Dr. Pepper had added a new drink to their line-up in the more than 122 years that the company had been around. Unfortunately, they learned the hard way that you shouldn’t try to mess with a good thing, when Red Fusion flopped hard. Production of the bright red soda was cancelled just over a year after it first hit shelves. Red Fusion’s unique and, let’s face it, kind of weird, flavor might have been one of the reasons why this soda didn’t do as well as Dr. Pepper expected it to. The soda’s flavor is described as Pepper-Style Soda with Red Cherries. Essentially, it’s Dr. Pepper meets Red Cherries. Hence the name, Red Fusion. No matter how good fans of the soda said it tasted, people probably approached this soda with a healthy dose of skepticism, which couldn’t have been great for sales. That being said, Red Fusion has some pretty awesome reviews. If you were a fan of Red Fusion back in the day, or you’re interested in trying it, it’s supposed to taste quite similar to the soft drink Cheerwine, which is still being produced.
3. Pepsi Blue
For two years in the early 2000s, a new Pepsi product joined the classic flavors we know and love on supermarket shelves. It might have had the word “Pepsi” in its name, but that’s where the similarities between Pepsi Blue and regular Pepsi stop. What exactly Pepsi Blue’s official flavor is, no one can really say. Even the creators of the soda might not be sure. It was simply described as berry flavored. People who tried the soda tried their best to find an answer to this question, but opinions were mixed. Some people said it was raspberry-flavored, while others argued that it was closer to blueberry. There were even people who said that, other than a slight aftertaste, the flavor came nowhere close to tasting like any sort of berry – they thought the soda was better described as tasting like cotton candy. From that description, you can probably guess that this soft drink was as sweet as they come. As it turns out, Pepsi Blue’s excess sweetener was entirely intentional. Before the release of this soda, PepsiCo had come out with Mountain Dew Red, a brightly colored, super sweet soda that was a hit among teens. The company hoped that Pepsi Blue would cater to the same audience. The logic was there, but the strategy didn’t pay off. On top of that, the dye used to give the soda its blue color, Blue 1, was banned in many countries, which lead to quite the controversy. That was the last straw for PepsiCo, and Pepsi Blue was quickly discontinued in North American markets.
2. Mountain Dew Sangrita Blast
Another gone, but not forgotten, soft drink is Mountain Dew’s Sangrita Blast. For those of you who missed out on this one, Sangrita Blast was a maroon-colored soft drink, with a flavor described as “Citrus Punch”. Even when it was still being produced, this soda wasn’t all that easy to get your hands on. Sangrita Blast was released alongside five other Mountain Dew drinks, all of which were exclusively sold at select Taco Bell locations. At one point, Taco Bell also offered a slush-style variant of this drink, named Sangrita Blast Freeze, but it was only available for a few months before being replaced by Mountain Dew Starburst Cherry Freeze. Sangrita Blast was popular enough that, a year or so after its Taco Bell release, it was made available in stores for one summer, and one summer only. Mountain Dew loves its limited edition products. People loved this flavor so much that there was actually a clock on Mountain Dew’s website counting down to its in-store release. Not long after the bottles and cans of Sangrita Blast disappeared from supermarket shelves, it was also removed from Taco Bell. They replaced it with another Mountain Dew flavor, called Spiked (Lemonade). Despite being sold for a very short time, and its very limited spread, Sangrita Blast gained an impressive following. This makes its discontinuation even more confusing. It hasn’t been that long since this soda was discontinued, so there’s always a chance that Mountain Dew is biding its time, and preparing Sangrita Blast for a comeback in the not-so-distant future. Of all the soft drinks on this list, this is the one that has the best odds of being brought back, so keep your fingers crossed.
1. Mr. PiBB
The Coca-Cola Company developed Mr. PiBB in the early seventies with the goal of creating a drink that could compete with the wildly popular Dr. Pepper. They were a bit too obvious with their efforts at first, initially naming this soda “Peppo”. They got sued for that one. And that’s how they landed on the name Mr. PiBB, which sounds significantly less like a Dr. Pepper knock-off than “Peppo” did. While it wasn’t overtaking Dr. Pepper in sales by any means, Mr. PiBB did okay for itself at first. Throughout the seventies and eighties, Coca-Cola poured tons of money and effort into marketing the soda, with the hope of boosting sales. They tried celebrity endorsements, catchy slogans, and came out with more advertisements than we can count. In the early eighties, the actually revamped the soft drink’s formula, and redesigned the can and packaging. The Mr. PiBB’s logo was tweaked many times over the years – at one point, a lawsuit was filed against Coca-Cola because it had created a logo that was a little too similar to the Dr. Pepper one. Despite the many efforts to keep the soda afloat, Mr. PiBB got progressively less popular as years went by. The brand got a reboot in the early 2000s, when PiBB Xtra, a new flavor of the soda was released, but, as for the original flavor, well, it’s five minutes of fame seem to be up.