My name is Jason Toon and I’m a sodaholic. The way I deal with my addiction is to write ambivalent pieces about soda in Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture, wrapping my genuine affection in a transparent casing of snark.
When I go back to visit my hometown of St. Louis, I usually stay with my brother Jamie. One of the things I love about that is that he keeps his refrigerator well-stocked with the kinds of sodas that I can’t find in Australia. I’ve cut way back on my soda consumption at home, but when I’m at Jamie’s, I live by vacation rules.
He’s partial to the Dr. Pepper extended universe with the occasional detour into Mountain Dew territory. The flagship versions of those sodas are rare down under, let alone the kinds of flavor variants in his fridge. Most of them have so many qualifiers and details in the product name, they wind up crazy long, like Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. That started Jamie on a quest to find the soda with the longest name - a quest I have hereby joined, as long as I don’t have to drink them all…
Smashing the seven-word barrier
Let’s define our terms. By “name”, we mean the brand and variant that the brand themselves would use to label this soda. There are a lot of words on every soda label, so when in doubt, we go with the name on the company’s official product page or press releases.
At first, Jamie thought seven words was the limit beyond which no soda name could go. Here’s just a sampling:
But then Jamie discovered the “collab” between Mountain Dew and Trolli, the German-founded company that makes Gummi Bears and all kinds of sour pressed-sugar confections. This Copernican moment demolished our understanding of the universe. After finding some official confirmation of the product names, we are prepared to announce that the world record of eight words has been set by:
It is our official judgment that the “x” functions more as a hyphen than an ampersand, as it is not spoken aloud. Thus it is not counted as a word. We will not hear further appeals on this matter.
First diet, then the deluge
How did we get here? The first fizzy soft drinks aimed for a short, sharp, memorable name: Coca-Cola, Pepsi, 7-Up, and countless regional sodies from Moxie to RC to Big Red. And many of those recipes would go unchanged for generations. You knew that if you got a Coca-Cola, that could only be one thing. It would be the same one thing every time. It probably tasted just like the one your dad got, and just like the one your grandpa got, minus maybe some cocaine. So it went, decade after frosty, fizzy decade.
The first crack in this wall came in the early 1960s. In response to early low-calorie colas like No-Cal and Diet-Rite, both Pepsi and Coke launched their own diet sodas, but with one big difference. Coca-Cola the company thought Coca-Cola the brand was sacrosanct. They would not append anything to Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola would always and forevermore be just Coca-Cola, period, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Their diet soda was christened Tab.
Pepsi was not quite so precious. They decided their one-calorie cola (originally called Patio) would be easier to sell if it were called Diet Pepsi. So by 1964, Pepsi had just the one name variant, Coke had none. And as far as the Big Two were concerned, that’s pretty much where it stayed for about 20 years. (7-Up changed the name of their low-cal version, Like, to Diet 7-Up in 1970.)
In 1982, Coca-Cola finally realized that the value of one of the world’s most iconic brands wasn’t a finite treasure to be hoarded but a booster to be unleashed, especially when Diet Pepsi was beating Tab like a rented cymbal. So after a hundred years as the only Coca-Cola product, the flagship soda was joined by Diet Coke. Soon after, it was followed by Caffeine-Free Diet Coke, inaugurating the four-word era of soda names.
After dietary concerns, along came flavor variants to complicate the story further. Cherry Coke debuted in 1985, three years before Pepsi Wild Cherry. Each was also available in a diet version. The expansion of flavors built slowly through the ‘90s, with Pepsi dabbling in such misfires as the coffee-flavored Pepsi Kona and the candy-flavored Pepsi Candy, while Coke, as always, played it close to the vest. The likes of 7-Up, Dr. Pepper, and Mountain Dew were mostly content to keep it simple.
Brand x Brand
Then the 2000s hit, and all bets were off. Every big soda maker went nuts with every possibly palatable flavor combination (except actual nuts), not to mention an endless barrage of new colors, sweeteners, throwback lines, and “health” jive. This was the age that brought us Mountain Dew Baja Blast, Diet Coke Plus Vitamins, Coca-Cola Blāk, Pepsi Salted Caramel - and it’s the age we’re still living in today.
But it took a 2020s twist to finally break through to an eight-word soda name: “collabs”. This is when one junk food tastes like a totally different kind of junk food. Pepsi teamed up with IHOP for Pepsi Maple Syrup. Coke joined forces with Jack Daniels and Oreo - mercifully not at the same time. And as we’ve seen, Mountain Dew and Trolli combined for the longest soda name yet known to humankind.
The flavor arms race, the limited-time gimmicks, the collabs all look set to keep on escalating. Soda companies will keep piling on the qualifiers to grab a few moments of notoriety in an ever-more-crowded cooler case. Watch the beverage aisle, soft-drink lexicographers: the first nine-word soda can’t be far away, if it hasn’t been bottled already.
How has your soda preference changed over the years? I basically had none around the house as a kid, so when I went to 7-11, I’d mix ’em all up (sans Diet, of course). Then Mountain Dew, sometimes with a dash of cherry. These days, old man that I am, it’s pretty solidly Coke Zero outside of the occasional movie theater Mountain Dew treat. Let’s hear your picks, or what you drink instead of soda, in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
previous Shoddy Goods stories:
And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It gets weird!