18 Sodas* for a Weird Time

Adventures in beverage classification

I cannot say I recommend the experience of watching an institution you have loved your entire life get very publicly thrown into corporate turmoil, especially if said institution also provides your employment, especially if said corporate turmoil involves you and most of your coworkers learning you will all be laid off in the next three months. Not the best few weeks of my life! But there’s one aspect of this whole deal that has been genuinely lovely, and that’s being reminded of how many supportive, thoughtful people I’m lucky to have around me. Including some college pals who had 18 sodas delivered to me from a specialty grocer as soon as they saw the news back on January 19. Before I could be called into a meeting with HR. Before I had a chance to put anything on social media. I had 18 sodas at my door! The power of friendship.

Yeah, sorry, I know there are only 17 sodas pictured here. Simply could not get the iPhone auto-select lasso to recognize the can of Recess adaptogen-infused blood orange sparkling water as part of the set. Do not worry! I photographed the Recess one-on-one before I drank it. (See below.)

I have now tried most of these, and I’ve considered the others as I have seen them in my fridge, and I have been pondering a question: Where does “soda” begin and end? Yes, I’m aware there is a technical, specialized definition. I’m not talking about that. (Although even that is flimsier than you might expect!) I’m interested in what feels like a soda. What are the spiritual boundaries of the category? How much separation is there, really, between the drinking experience of a flavored seltzer and a light fruit soda? Where is the line? Of the 18 sodas and soda-adjacent-ish beverages that took up residence in my refrigerator on January 19, which ones are definitely sodas, which ones are not, and which ones are in some confusing, carbonated gray area of modern beverage consumption? This is what I wanted to understand.

My recent bounty is not the first time I’ve wondered about this question. It is, in fact, one of the very first ideas I put in my Notes app last year when I started thinking about the possibility of a soda newsletter. (“What is a soda? [spiritually, not technically]” is how I phrased it.¹) This was not something I ever considered for the first, oh, 25 years of my life; soda was soda. This was uncomplicated. I could easily identify a Coke (that’s soda) and a LaCroix (that’s not soda) and never the twain did meet. Beautiful! Obvious! Intuitive! But the last few years have introduced some… complexities.

There has been wild growth in the sparkling water category, alongside the rise of a bunch of somewhat niche, low-calorie soda brands that market themselves as healthy choices. Say what you will about the last ~half-decade, but if nothing else, it’s been an incredible time to be a person who loves spending two dollars on a vaguely fruity carbonated beverage. The refrigerated shelf space at my grocery store includes some very obvious sodas. It includes some very obvious sparkling waters. It also now includes some drinks that strike me as trickier to categorize.

An example: Take a ginger-lemon Olipop versus a ginger-citrus-twist Waterloo. The former bills itself as “a new kind of soda,” while the latter is from a sparkling water company, Water- literally in the name, with the slogan “water down nothing.” Again, I can grasp the official difference here. A soda will typically have some kind of sweetener or syrup, and 40-calorie Olipop has cassava root syrup, albeit only as its sixth listed ingredient; 0-calorie Waterloo does not. And the Olipop does indeed have a certain depth of flavor lacking from the Waterloo. I get it! But what does this distinction mean in practice? Does one of these feel like an obvious soda while the other feels like an obvious flavored sparkling water? They’re distinct enough that I would certainly be able to identify them as two different beverages if given a blindfolded taste test. But could I tell you which one calls itself soda and which one calls itself sparkling water? Not with especially great confidence. Could I tell you on taste alone why one ginger-lemon, caffeine-free, naturally flavored carbonated drink should be considered a soda and why the other should not? I don’t think so!

It feels relevant that nearly all of these new soda companies have oriented their marketing around the idea that they’re not like other sodas. Look at their slogans. You have Olipop’s aforementioned “new kind of soda,” Poppi’s “it’s time to love soda again,” Culture Pop’s “soda you can feel good about.”² Poppi made a whole Super Bowl commercial around this idea. Which, you know, fine. I understand. They’re soda, they say, but they’re also not soda, with a coy little wink heavily implied. These sodas are fun. Light. Fresh. Carrying the slick branding of a well-heeled start-up. Promising they are prebiotic and somehow connected to “gut health.” But there comes a point where a new kind of soda feels closer to an old kind of seltzer. Sure, maybe the flavor is more pronounced, or the carbonation a shade more obvious. But is that enough to make it truly feel like a soda? To that point—what, specifically, makes a soda? The bubbles? The flavor? The branding? Here is what I’ve struggled with. (And to be clear: I’m not opposed to any of these drinks! The branding can be eye-roll-inducing, yes, but such are the breaks of modern life. I actually quite enjoy some of these flavors. [This newsletter has already documented how much I spent on single-can purchases of Olipop in 2023.] I would not be writing a soda newsletter if were I not highly susceptible to any beverage that feels like it could make for a fun little treat.) Some of these are great. But do they seem to me, immediately and obviously, like soda?

There is a line here. I’m just unsure where it is.

My approach to this question over recent years has been very Potter Stewart: I know a soda when I see one. But the 18 beverages in my fridge over the last month provided a wonderful thought experiment. A spectrum of sodas. An opportunity for me to judge, precisely, where the line might rest between soda and non-soda.

Here is my breakdown:

OBVIOUSLY SODA

Coke, Diet Coke, Mexican Coke,³ Seagram’s ginger ale, Jarritos (grapefruit), Jarritos (mandarin)

Great. No complexities here. I am not going to waste your time explaining why Diet Coke is a soda. But I will say that I believe this particular group could form the basis of a core soda box set! You have your colas, your ginger ale, your fruit sodas. All you need to add is a root beer, a clear, citrus flavor, and a cream soda, and you’d be in business.

Notes: As a Diet Coke devotee who rarely drinks regular Coke, it was kind of a treat to open the fridge at home and see a Coke, there for the taking as a standard afternoon beverage, no special occasion.⁴ Also, I love Jarritos but had never had the pleasure of the grapefruit before! Delicious.

OBVIOUSLY NOT SODA: Bawi agua fresca (pineapple), Bawi agua fresca (lime), De La Calle tepache (classic pineapple spice), De La Calle tepache (picante mango chili), Swoon pink lemonade, Walker Brothers kombucha, Motto sparkling matcha, Recess blood orange magnesium- and adaptogen-infused sparkling water

I toyed around with some parameters here: You’re not a soda if you’re fermented. You’re not a soda if your full product name is eight words. You’re not a soda if you might be sold by a child at a roadside stand. But that was over-complicating the situation, I realized. Here’s the only line I needed to draw in the sand: You’re not a soda if you are clearly already something else. Agua fresca? You are your own thing. Kombucha? Tepache? Pink lemonade? Sparkling matcha? You are all your own precious, distinct, clearly named entities! Some of you are soda-adjacent. You are islands only just off the coast of our soda nation, close enough to be accessible by rowboat, maybe even within the reach of an ambitious swimmer. But there is still water in between.

Notes: The first drink I had out of this whole set was the Recess, opened basically immediately upon receipt, because it seemed at the time like I could benefit from something whose can advertised it would make the drinker feel “calm cool collected”. (No punctuation—presumably on account of how calm you will be after drinking.) Can’t say it did the job, but I imagine they were going for “take the edge off a mildly annoying meeting,” not “handle the potential impending death of Sports Illustrated.” Enjoyed the matcha. I was not the biggest fan of the Swoon pink lemonade—the sweetness felt off—but the Barbie tie-in can was cute. And my biggest win from this group were the De La Calles—I’d had tepache before, but never from a can, and I really liked both flavors here.

THE GREAT COMPLICATED GRAY AREA: United Sodas of America (pear elderflower), Poppi (raspberry rose), Mayawell (strawberry ginger), Ghia (non-alcoholic aperitif le spritz soda)

All of these have a fruity, light, floral flavor. All of them advertise natural ingredients with no artificial sweeteners. All have 30 to 40 calories. And, of course, all fall into the category that originally provoked my curiosity here. I know these are sodas! (They are, in fact, rather aggressive on that point, nearly overcompensating: “United Sodas of America,” etc.) But do they feel like sodas? Might I find my answer here? Would I detect, somewhere in each can, the essence of soda-dom? …No. I could not.

I enjoyed them all to varying degrees. I would probably drink each of them again. I thought about trying to arrange them on a scale of soda-ness, but I kept contradicting myself, over- or under-rating flavor intensity or carbonation level in a way that felt illogical in conversation with other sodas. I thought of the fruit soda I had just tried and declared “obviously soda”: Jarritos. If that is so clearly soda to me, and these are not, what is the specific difference? Is it just that I have seen Jarritos as a soda for years, uncritically accepting it as such in childhood, and now have a harsher eye for newer additions? Am I just a fruit soda hypocrite? I don’t think so. (Well, at least not in this particular way.) Jarritos benefits from its full-bodied sweetness and the fact that it comes in a glass bottle. It does feel indubitably like a soda in a way these newer, lighter options do not. Poppi and Mayawell and United Sodas of America are in a different category. But they’re decent for what they are.

I remain a bit skeptical. But these all call themselves sodas, and I know they are sodas, technically, and so I am cautiously ready to embrace them as sodas, emotionally.

Notes: I loooooooved the Ghia, which is really in a different category as a non-alcoholic aperitif, and has the depth of a good cocktail. (I’m a sucker for anything with rosemary.) And the best pure flavor here goes to United Sodas of America. I’ve got to say I did not have high hopes for pear elderflower, but man, that was good.

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Thank you to everyone who’s reached out with kind words lately. May all of you have people in your life who’d send 18 sodas to your door on a bad day! Cheers.

1. Some other ideas on that list: “types of ice cubes” and “occasions to drink ginger ale, ranked”

2. Also, neither here nor there, but their names all use “pop” over “soda.” And none are from the Midwest! (Olipop is headquartered in Oakland, Poppi in Austin and Culture Pop in Cambridge, MA.)

3. God bless my friends for understanding they had to get me all three of these. What a blessing to have people who know my heart so clearly.

4. I suppose “getting laid off” is kind of a special occasion, actually, but regardless