Breakthrough

Sometime around the early 1990's Coca-cola came out with a new brand of "pop" called OK Soda. I distinctly remember it's shiny silver and black can and it's very unique flavor, which the rumor going around was that it secretly was a combination of all of Coca-cola's soda products. It was marketed heavily with TV and radio ads during it's short duration on grocery store shelves. The ads were really strange, featuring comments that people would make to a 1-800 hotline about how their lives had been affected by Ok soda. My cousins Andy and I used to scheme about calling the number and leaving something just totally brillant and hilarious. I guess we never really did that because I don't remember hearing any ads with our comments. Also, when we sensed that OK soda was going to be pulled off the shelf, Andy kept one of the cans and had me sign a can so we could forever have a keepsake of what that soda meant to us.

What's really funny is that from time to time something will spark my memory of OK soda and I'll launch into this story about what a crazy product it was, but no one has ever been able to corroborate my story outside of my fellow midwestern cousins. As you guessed this happened today (I was telling my coworkers about it) and thus, this blog was born. I also did some research because it always baffled me why I was the only one who knew about it.

So today, I found out why:
Despite a nationwide advertising campaign and intense media attention, OK Soda was marketed only in select areas, representing different demographic areas during the summer of 1994. This is a common form of marketing research known as "test marketing", in which a product is launched on a small-scale to determine the likely acceptance of the product when it is introduced to the wider market. Some of the testing locations were:
Austin, Texas
Boston, Massachusetts
Denver, Colorado
Knoxville, Tennessee
Portland, Oregon
Providence, Rhode Island
Little Rock, Arkansas
Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota
Omaha, Nebraska
Fargo, North Dakota
Sacramento, California
Seattle, Washington
Atlantic Canada
Most soda drinkers found the taste blandly unappealing, and OK Soda never captured more than 3% of the beverage market in any of the target locations, failing to match Zyman's hype. The project was cancelled by Coca-Cola just seven months after its kickoff, and the soda was never widely released to the public.

So apparently none of my southern friends ever got a chance to benefit from this phenominon.

More interesting Ok Soda facts:

OK Soda had a more "citric" taste than traditional colas, almost like a Fruit Punch version of Coke's Fresca. Some reviewers described it as "slightly spicy". Others likened it to a combination of orange soda and flat Coca-Cola. In contrast to earlier beverages from the 1980s also noted for their marketing campaigns, such as Jolt and Red Bull, OK Soda's caffeine content was not emphasized. A 12-ounce serving of OK Soda had only 40.5 milligrams of caffeine, slightly less than Coca-Cola itself (45.6 mg).

Many OK Soda fans have attempted to recreate the taste of OK Soda from memory. Though the actual formula is unknown, a generally accepted recipe for the approximate taste is:

¼ orange soda
¾ semi-flat Coca-Cola
a splash of Dr. Pepper