Coca-Cola BlāK
Coke's coffee-flavored "carbonated fusion beverage" in a sleek little glass bottle — the drink that asked "what if espresso, but soda?" in 2006 and got its answer by 2008. You probably tried it exactly once, and you remember the aftertaste either way.
Coca-Cola BlāK was Coke's swing at the Starbucks decade: a coffee-flavored cola, launched first in France in 2006 and then in the United States on April 3 of that year. The packaging did most of the flirting — a curvy 8-ounce glass contour bottle with a resealable cap in the US, an aluminum bottle in France — and the "carbonated fusion beverage" label positioned it as a premium sip for grown-ups, a mid-calorie pick-me-up rather than a lunchbox soda.
The problem was the liquid. The American formula swapped France's sugar for high-fructose corn syrup plus aspartame and acesulfame potassium, and Consumer Reports found the French version less sweet and more genuinely coffee-flavored — American tasters mostly got flat Coke wearing coffee perfume with a diet-soda aftertaste. Sales never caught on; the discontinuation surfaced in trade press in August 2007, and by 2008 BlāK was gone from US shelves.
The idea, though, was just early. Coca-Cola circled back in 2021 with Coca-Cola with Coffee, and by then canned coffee-cola hybrids were an ordinary supermarket category. BlāK survives as a collector's curio — those little glass bottles turn up online, priced like the failed prophecy they are.
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