Sprite + Tea

A while back there was a fairly polarizing trend on Reddit of infusing bottled Sprite with black tea bags via overnight cold brewing. As you can imagine given the tea community on reddit, this was a contentious experiment with people having very extreme feelings on it.

Well, queue the announcement/commercialization of this new tea flavoured Sprite which seems to at least in part have been inspired by this trend of mixing Sprite and grocery store style/quality black tea blends. From the perspective of someone who works in product development, I think this is actually a really brilliant product offering from Coca Cola and smart line addition. But as a tea drinker myself, I am of course skeptical about the execution. To start, it’s not actually made with tea but “tea flavoured” and there’s no caffeine in the drink at all. So, really, this is “tea” under the loosest definition.

But I still needed to give it a try because, ultimately, taste trumps all else and if it tastes good (relative for the type/style of product) then that’s the most important thing. I’ve had a couple cans of this now, trying to decide what I think, and ultimately I think I just find the flavour underwhelming. Not bad. Not offensive. But just too light. It’s like they put more focus into getting the colour of the soda correct for what they were trying to emulate, but it doesn’t really remind me of black tea or any other type of tea all too much when I’m drinking it. In fact, if I was drinking this blind without the placebo of seeing the more golden amber liquor I might actually think it’s just regular Sprite with a slightly weird aftertaste.

To me, it’s a shame because I think the potential was strong here. But ultimately it’s not going to be the “tea drinkers” that dictate the success of this product – it will be the soda drinkers who are regular consumers of Sprite. Is it enough tea flavour from them? Do they even like the concept of combining the two drinks? Appealing to their palate and sensibilities is definitely the more commercially viable path…