Pepsi Twist
Pepsi with a shot of lemon and a yellow spiral on the label — the cola aisle's big swing of the early 2000s. Britney Spears sold it, the Osbournes sold it at the Super Bowl, and by 2006 it was gone from American shelves.
Pepsi test-marketed its lemon-flavored cola in Minnesota and Texas starting June 16, 2000, then launched Pepsi Twist across the US on November 5, 2001, diet version and all — a calculated swing at a flavored-cola market where Coca-Cola was readying its own lemon counterpart. The push was pure turn-of-the-millennium celebrity saturation: Britney Spears fronted it through 2002 and 2003, including a tie-in with Austin Powers in Goldmember, and the 2003 Super Bowl got a spot where the Osbourne family turned out to be Ozzy's nightmare of the Osmonds — with Florence Henderson along for the gag.
For a moment the yellow spiral felt inevitable. Then the moment passed: Pepsi discontinued Twist in the US in the summer of 2006, with only a brief NFL-themed return in 2008 as an echo. The ghost of the lemon-cola wars lives on abroad — Pepsi Twist is still stocked in parts of South America and Europe, in countries like Brazil, Poland, Romania, and Portugal — a flavor experiment that stuck everywhere except where it started.
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