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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The cherry-red Mountain Dew that felt genuinely edgy in 2001 — a new flavor, a darker can, and a tongue-staining color that made regular Dew look tame. It was the drink of LAN parties and late-night gaming.
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The clear cola that tasted like 90s optimism and regret mixed together. Crystal Pepsi was caffeine-free, marketed on a fever dream of purity, and backed by a Super Bowl ad that tried desperately to make it cool.
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Coca-Cola's aggressively marketed neon-green citrus soda that positioned itself as the extreme-sports answer to Pepsi's Mountain Dew. Heavy on caffeine and attitude, Surge fueled the mayhem marketing of the late 90s before vanishing from shelves in 2003 — only to surge back after a passionate fan movement brought it to Amazon in 2014.
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PepsiCo's high-energy guaraná drink, marketed as "Better do the good stuff now" and remembered for its dark snarling-cat branding. Often credited as the first energy drink from a major U.S. beverage company, it arrived years ahead of the energy-drink boom — and was gone by 1999.