7 Discontinued Sodas From The '90s We'd Like To Give Another Try

Brands want to find the next hot thing that draws in customers, and that means constantly introducing and removing products from store shelves. Soda is an excellent example of this as companies chase the latest trends and constantly compete against each other. One look at the soda aisle in your local grocery store is all you need to understand just how serious companies are about throwing flavors at customers in an effort to make more sales.

However, customer tastes are so varied that a soda flavor can have a dedicated group of fans that's still too small to keep the soda in production. Several sodas have gone away over the years, including many from the 1990s. While some of these occasionally return for limited promotions, most have faded away except in memory and a few vintage can collections. It's always nice to see a picture of a long-lost favorite, so here are discontinued sodas from the '90s we'd like to give another try.

Josta was also probably the most missed of these discontinued sodas, with fans still reminiscing about its flavor and deep red color decades later and spearheading campaigns to bring it back. Some have even tried to create copycat recipes because they missed the soda so much.

PepsiCo released Josta in 1995 but pulled it from shelves after only four years because of low sales. The company said younger customers liked it, but the soda wasn't that popular outside of that age range.

Josta's claim to fame was its combination of caffeine and guarana, an extract made from the seeds of the Paullinia cupana plant. Guarana contains a lot of caffeine itself, and it's still a common ingredient in energy drinks. Josta's flavor has been described as everything from fruity to incredibly similar to cough medicine, but the flavor was really a combination of guarana and dragonfruit. Fans have reported contacting PepsiCo to ask the company to bring it back, but so far, the pleas haven't worked. Occasionally a very old can shows up in some corner of the internet, but the company has no plans to resurrect the soda. For those who really need to see a bottle of Josta, though, the soda does feature in the "Loki" T.V. series.

Storm was a short-lived attempt from Pepsi to sell a lemon-lime soda that also contained caffeine. Most other lemon-lime sodas were caffeine-free, save for Mountain Dew and Surge. Storm was meant to be a successor to Slice and a competitor to Sprite. However, the soda never made it into nationwide distribution, instead staying as a test-market-only drink from 1998 to 2000. At that point, Pepsi decided to remove Storm and lemon-lime Slice, and introduce the caffeine-free Sierra Mist.

Storm may not have made it out of test-market distribution, but it wasn't for lack of trying. In at least one market, the soda was the sponsor of the nightly weather report on one of the local news channels. It was also part of a marketing campaign for "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace." And people did like it, so it wasn't pulled due to bad flavor or anything like that. It simply didn't catch on enough to warrant making it available across the nation.

This one is probably the most obscure soda on this list, despite the brand name. Back in 1990, Popsicle (yes, that's a brand name, not just a product) decided to make a soda version of its Fudgsicle pops. The graphics on the can matched the graphics on Fudgsicle boxes, so if you had seen it, you knew exactly which company it was from.

Except, instead of announcing it and advertising it everywhere, the company decided to simply release it without really letting anyone know. There's barely any information about it online, other than it was discontinued around 1992.

Chocolate soda wasn't new, and there was definitely a market for it. Canfield's Diet Chocolate Fudge Soda has been around since at least 1972, and in 2025, Shasta released a zero-sugar chocolate soda that got good reviews. Why Popsicle didn't push the flavor more isn't known. However, within a couple of years, the company pulled the soda, and it was never heard from again.

Snapple was known for its popular tea and lemonade flavors, but the company released a line of sodas in 1983, too. Among these was a clear version of root beer that the company touted as all-natural (although it apparently contained high-fructose corn syrup, which not many people would consider "natural"). All of the sodas, including the root beer, lasted until around the mid-1990s, and since Snapple's heyday was in the 1990s, we're counting this as a '90s soda.

All of the sodas were received well, and it's not known why the company pulled them from the shelves. Snapple won't even give a reason why some flavors are discontinued (other than a flavor being a limited edition) in its FAQ. However, it does say that if you really want to see a flavor return, you can let the brand know. Of course, that's no guarantee it'll return.

A few Snapple and root beer drinkers didn't like the flavor, and some thought it kind of strange, noting that the flavor tilted more toward licorice than typical root beer. However, a lot of people loved it. People who've posted about it online have raved about the flavor, noting how much they miss it and how much they adored it. Even those who didn't drink it that much tended to like it. Whether the company would bring it back is unknown, but fans, you can always try.

One of the other sodas that Snapple released was the Cherry-Lime Rickey, and if you thought the root beer was popular, you haven't seen anything yet. When you look up opinions of the root beer, you find people missing it and talking about how great it was. But apparently, so many people miss the Cherry-Lime Rickey that when they post about it, they beg Snapple to bring it back, or beg the company to answer why it was discontinued in the first place. Unfortunately, if one Redditor is to be believed, the company has decided not to bring it back. This person claims they emailed Snapple but noted, "they said they'll never make it again."

A lime rickey is a classic soda-fountain drink that combines seltzer, lime juice, and syrup and is often flavored with additional fruit flavors, like cherry or raspberry. What flavor you got often depended on what city you lived in, with New Yorkers preferring cherry. It's a non-alcoholic version of a drink that's alternately called a rickey or a gin rickey, one of the oldest cocktails still made today. The soda-fountain lime rickey served as a substitute during Prohibition, apparently because the lime juice provided enough of a jolt, flavor-wise, to sort of take the place of alcohol. The lime rickey's popularity faded during the middle of the 20th century but saw a revival as soda fountains themselves have come back into vogue in the past couple of decades.

From about 1985 to 2005, Minute Maid offered a line of sodas with flavors ranging from orange (of course) to strawberry. One of those flavors was grape (sometimes sold as "grape medley"), introduced around 1996. The grape flavor, along with orange, Valencia orange, strawberry, fruit punch, a few Slurpee tie-ins, and other flavors, brings up many good memories for people who grew up in the 1990s. Go online, and you'll see more than a few people claiming that a picture of the cans unlocked some nostalgia. As for grape flavor specifically, people remember drinking it all the time as children, calling it one of the best grape sodas that was ever available.

The Minute Maid soda line actually got its start in Canada about a year before it was introduced to U.S. consumers. The sodas contained 10% fruit juice and appeared to be competition for Pepsi's Slice soda, which also contained juice. No reason was given for the discontinuation, but the most likely reason is that Coca-Cola, which owns Minute Maid, wanted to concentrate on other soda lines. The company also owns Fanta, which has its own grape flavor. If you truly miss grape soda with the Minute Maid label, you'll have to seek out an import shop or travel to Taiwan, which has a zero-sugar version of green-grape soda.

In 1993, the mainly Western-U.S.-based Shasta soda brand teamed up with Nintendo to release a four-flavor set of sodas named after the Super Mario franchise. The sodas were for sale both in the U.S. and Japan, and while the Japanese market loved them, the U.S. market didn't. The sodas were discontinued in 1994.

All four flavors came in squat 8-ounce cans, which were nothing like the conventional 12-ounce cans that soda normally came in — and one of the things people remember about the sodas is the shape of those cans. Consumers could choose from Yoshi Apple, Luigi Berry, Mario Punch, and Princess Toadstool Cherry.

One of the funnier aspects of looking up these sodas online is figuring out when many people started playing Mario and Super Mario games; Princess Toadstool is better known to later generations of players as Princess Peach, and the difference in names is usually a topic of discussion when someone mentions the sodas. Yoshi Apple seems to get a few more mentions than the other flavors, but you'll find fans noting that one or two of the other three were their favorites. One person online noted their parents would use the sodas as drink mixers. At least one person has mentioned hoping the sodas would come back, but there don't appear to be any plans.