Whatever Happened To Sierra Mist?

If you're a semi-regular soda drinker, or just enjoy it as an occasional treat, you may have noticed that one brand has disappeared: Sierra Mist. Launched in 1999, the lemon-lime soda was engineered to compete with Sprite and 7UP, but after 24 years of failing to take a bite out of its rivals, it was discontinued in 2023. Now, a new lemon-lime beverage has taken its place in PepsiCo's stable of soft drinks — and alongside it, a renewed effort to take the crown from the likes of Sprite.

The name's Starry, and it's been aggressively positioning itself as the younger, more hip alternative to Coca-Cola's classic lemon-lime soda. Earlier this year, PepsiCo took out a Super Bowl ad for Starry featuring Ice Spice flanked by a cartoon lemon and lime. When her distraught preppy ex approaches her, the rapper explains she "just needed something more refreshing, more crisp," to which he bursts into a sobbing mess of (we assume) lemon-lime soda. The whole thing is a dig at Sprite, which has closely associated itself with hip-hop culture since the '80s.

Sierra Mist was always in a precarious position, fighting an uphill battle since its debut a quarter of a century ago. With Sprite swallowing up the market share on lemon-lime soda and its use of bonafide hip-hop acts like Nas and A Tribe Called Quest in its marketing, Coca-Cola's spinoff drink has a lot of cultural cache, too. However, PepsiCo relied on the supposedly more refreshing lift of Sierra Mist to sell itself and leaned on that aspect of the product in its ads. Needless to say, it didn't really pan out, which may explain why successor Starry, launched in 2023, is so eager to play the game by Sprite's rules and go the pop culture route.

So far, Starry seems confident in its campaign to court more Gen Z customers, with slogans like "Starry Hits Different" and a colorful can design that evokes the branding of up-and-coming soda brands like Olipop. No doubt, this is also part of an effort to make it stand out alongside a rebrand of PepsiCo mainstay Mountain Dew. Like Sierra Mist before it, though, Coca-Cola doesn't seem too bothered by its newest competitor.