Pepsi Blue
The electric-blue, berry-flavored soda PepsiCo pushed with a huge early-2000s marketing blitz — Britney-era ads, Papa Roach tie-ins, and a taste somewhere between cotton candy and berry. Gone by 2004.
Pepsi Blue was the bright-blue, berry-flavored soda PepsiCo unleashed in the U.S. in 2002. Officially a 'Berry Cola Fusion' and dyed an unmistakable electric blue, it was reverse-engineered from more than 100 test flavors — inspired by the sales bump Mountain Dew Code Red had delivered the year before.
It launched with an enormous early-2000s marketing blitz: Britney-era Pepsi advertising, tie-ins with Papa Roach and the band Sev, product placement in The Italian Job, and free samples handed out from a Pepsi Blue-themed VW Beetle. People compared the taste to cotton candy with a berry aftertaste.
The hype didn't hold. Pepsi Blue was discontinued in the U.S. by 2004, though it survived for a while in markets like the Philippines and got a brief, nostalgia-driven re-release in 2021. It remains a perfect artifact of the era's 'make it weird, make it blue' soda experiments.
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Take the 7 UP logo and flip it upside down: dnL. Take the drink and flip it too — green soda in a clear bottle instead of clear soda in a green one, with caffeine instead of none and an extra citrus kick. The most committed-to-the-bit soft drink of the early 2000s lasted four years and left behind a small, devoted cult.