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The Big Can: a tallboy of iced tea wrapped in pastel southwestern art that looked like nothing else in the cooler. It came out of a Brooklyn warehouse in 1992 to fight Snapple, priced at 99 cents — a number the company later started printing on the aluminum itself, and has refused to let go of ever since, through thirty-plus years of inflation.
The indie soda in a glass bottle with a customer-submitted photo on every label — weird, grainy snapshots of real life where the big brands would have put a logo. And once a year, flavors like Turkey & Gravy turned the whole company into performance art.
A paper packet, a cup of sugar, a pitcher of water — and suddenly it was summer. Then a six-foot pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid exploded through the nearest wall yelling "OH YEAH!" and nobody in the commercial ever questioned it.
The iced-tea and juice-drink brand that defined 1990s refreshment, served in a distinctive glass bottle with a metal cap (the famous "Real Facts" printed under the lid didn't arrive until 2002). That satisfying pop when you opened it, the quirky trivia, and flavors like peach and raspberry made Snapple a generational memory.
Glass bottles with an embossed lizard, promising mystery potions brewed from ginseng, guarana, and ginkgo — words that meant nothing and sounded exactly like what the future was supposed to taste like. SoBe owned the gas-station cooler at the turn of the millennium, proof you were clued into something cooler than Gatorade.
The fluorescent orange juice drink that tasted like the sun and lived in every 90s fridge door. The ads where kids rejected "the purple stuff" are permanently burned into your memory.
The pastel wall of the 2000s deli case: candy-bright bottles, lowercase labels full of jokes, and flavors named for what they promised to do for you. Vitaminwater made hydration a personality choice — and made 50 Cent a legend of business-deal folklore.