The Sodas the '90s Took From Us
For much of the 1990s, the big soda companies seemed convinced that the next great drink would look nothing like the last one. Pepsi took the color out of cola, then poured coffee into it. Coca-Cola hired the Portland agency behind Nike's "Just Do It" to sell a soda to young people who supposedly distrusted advertising. Pepsi bet on guarana, a Brazilian berry with caffeine of its own, while a Connecticut startup bottled tea with ginseng and a Canadian company suspended flavored gel spheres in fruit drink so they hung in place, neither sinking nor rising.
This tour runs in rough order of birth, from a clear cola that reached test markets in April 1992 to an herbal fruit line Snapple launched in 1999. One 1999 arrival is left out on purpose: Sierra Mist was a plain lemon-lime soda that ran until 2023, a long career rather than a '90s fling. Snapple Elements stays, because its elemental names and herbal add-ins belong squarely to this crowd, and SoBe, born in 1995 and never officially discontinued, stays as the long-lived exception. Of the nine drinks here, five were gone before 2000.
Crystal Pepsi
Pepsi spent 15 months in the lab and tried more than 3,000 formulas, by the Seattle Times' count, to make a cola with no caramel color, no caffeine and no preservatives. It reached test markets in April 1992 and got a Super Bowl send-off on January 31, 1993, set to Van Halen's "Right Now." Drinkers expected something light and got a sweet cola. Coca-Cola's Tab Clear, which marketing chief Sergio Zyman later admitted was a "kamikaze," blurred things further. By 1994 it was gone, though it returned for short store runs in 2016 and 2017.
OK Soda
Zyman was also trying to launch a soda of his own. OK Soda reached a handful of test cities on April 20, 1994: a reddish-brown cross between cola and lemon-lime, in gray cans drawn by alternative cartoonists including Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns. Callers to 1-800-I-FEEL-OK could take a true-or-false quiz called the OK Personality Inventory. Zyman had reportedly promised his boss a 4 percent market share. Some distributors were pulling it by that fall, and in September 1995 Coca-Cola phased it out after about a million cases, without ever releasing it nationally.
Fruitopia
Coca-Cola's other 1994 bet pointed the opposite way, earnest where OK was ironic. Launched under Minute Maid with about $30 million in marketing and aimed at Snapple, Fruitopia sold fruit drinks with names like small meditations; by 1996 the lineup included Banana Vanilla Inclination and Mind Over Mango. In August 2003 Coke folded it into Minute Maid, saying that name had more staying power, and Strawberry Passion carried on under the plainer label. Coke said it would carry on in Canada and other markets at fountains and in bottles, and its Canadian frozen concentrate was dropped in early 2026.
Josta
Pepsi's 1995 experiment was Josta, a caffeinated soda flavored with guarana, sold in cans with a panther on them. A Pepsi spokesman told the Associated Press in 1996 that people were drawn to guarana by its powerful image and mystery. That July it was still being tested in Seattle and 19 other cities. Pepsi dropped it in 1999, about four years in. Fans kept a Save Josta campaign alive for more than a decade, and Pepsi-linked trademark filings in 2021 have yet to put a can on a shelf.
SoBe
Guarana turned up again in 1995 in Norwalk, Connecticut, where John Bello and Tom Schwalm started the South Beach Beverage Company with SoBe Black Tea 3G, a tea blended with ginseng, guarana and herbs. SoBe is the outlier here: it was wanted badly enough that Coca-Cola held exclusive talks and PepsiCo paid about $337 million in cash, closing on January 5, 2001. Then came the long fade. By 2023 PepsiCo's own locator listed only a handful of SoBe drinks, all marked regional, and in December 2024 the company said SoBe had not been nationally discontinued.
Pepsi Kona
In late May 1996 Pepsi tried a cola made with real coffee, a blend that included beans from Hawaii's Kona district, in the Philadelphia area only. Marketing manager Lori Tauber Marcus explained the choice: Pepsi was strong there, it was close to headquarters in Westchester County, and it let the company test a coffee drink outside the coffee-mad Northwest. In early June Pepsi said it had not decided whether to go national. Sales settled the question. After about a year of low sales, Kona was dropped in 1997. Pepsi Café, announced in 2019, was a new drink, not a revival.
Orbitz
Clearly Canadian's 1996 entry was not even carbonated, and the gimmick made that beside the point: flavored gel spheres, made to a patented Bush Boake Allen recipe and matched to the density of the liquid so they hung suspended in the bottle. Test marketing had reached Arizona by July 1996, a Canadian launch followed in April 1997, and early sales were good enough to add flavors across the US. But it was priced up to 50 percent above regular sodas, a 1998 patent suit was settled with a licensing fee, and in 1999 Orbitz was suspended and written down.
Surge
Coca-Cola was confident enough to skip test markets for Surge. Announced in December 1996 and on shelves in January 1997 with Super Bowl ads and the slogan "Feed the Rush," it was a green citrus soda with 52 mg of caffeine per 12-ounce can, matching Mountain Dew, its target. Fan-compiled figures reported by HuffPost show about 69 million cases in year one and 26.7 million in 1999. The caffeine reportedly put off the parents doing the buying. Coke pulled it in 2003, and fans with a crowdfunded billboard got it back on Amazon in September 2014.
Snapple Elements
Snapple ended the decade in 1999 with Fire, Rain, Earth and Sun, fruit drinks named for the classical elements. By May 2000 there were six fruit drinks and two teas, and new flavors Sky and Altitude came with ginseng and echinacea. In 2003 Snapple rebuilt the line as an energy drink in a silver aluminum bottle, with caffeine, ginseng and guarana, and by 2005 it was gone. It is the only drink here now officially back: Fire, Rain and a new Air in March 2022, Earth in 2023, and Sun timed to the April 2024 solar eclipse.
Count the endings and the pattern is hard to miss. Five of these nine were gone before 2000: Crystal Pepsi in 1994, OK Soda in 1995, Pepsi Kona in 1997, Josta and Orbitz in 1999. OK Soda and Pepsi Kona never got past their test markets, and Josta was still being tested in 20 cities more than a year after its debut. Of the four that made it into the new century, Fruitopia, Surge and Snapple Elements were all off US shelves in their original form by 2005, and SoBe now survives mostly as a corporate assurance that it still exists.
These drinks were sold on what they looked like or what they meant: clarity, irony, a mystery berry, spheres that floated in place. For most of them, the idea got people to try them; the second purchase was the hard part. Yet their afterlife is oddly busy. Crystal Pepsi, Surge and Snapple Elements have all returned in some form, the first two after organized fan campaigns, and sealed cans and bottles of four of these drinks trade as collectibles. The shelves gave up on them long before their fans did.
Updated Nov 1, 2026