Tuesday, August 21, 2007

I Drank This

Fruitopia is a fruit flavoured, non-carbonated drink introduced by The Coca-Cola Company in 1994 and targeted at teens and young adults.
According to New York Times business reports, it was invented as part of a push by Coca-Cola to capitalize on the success of Snapple and other flavored tea drinks. The most common flavor of this drink was "Strawberry Passion Awareness". This flavor was available at most drink fountains as well as McDonald's as Coca-Cola pushed this drink to market in many places. Fruitopia vending machines were also popular in schools and college campuses, in addition to, or as a replacement to soda. After Fruitopia was introduced in the United States, TIME magazine named it one of the Top 10 New Products of 1994. Much of the success of the drink is credited to famed beverage brew master, Steven A. Ricci, who was able to not only brew the recipe for the fruit drink, but create so many great tasting culminations. Steven A. Ricci left the Coca-Cola Co. in late 2000-early 2001, thus forcing Coca-Cola to discontinue the product without their heralded brew master.

Other flavors included The Grape Beyond, Tangerine Wavelength, Citrus Excursion, Fruit Integration, Pink Lemonade Euphoria, Lemonade Love & Hope, Raspberry Psychic Lemonade, and Beachside Blast. These flavors were available in the United States. A much wider array of flavors was available in the UK. In a drive to remake the brand and remarket it as more relevant to Generation X, Coca-Cola dropped several flavors in 1996 and added and renamed others.
Fruitopia's unusual commercials were quite interesting despite the simplicity of the product behind them. The commercials were animations, using images of fruit arrayed in brilliantly colored spinning kaleidoscope patterns, accompanied by idealistic aphorisms reminiscent of hippie poetry of the 1960s, such as might be found in advertisements which ran in underground press newspapers of the period. Background music on several of the ads was provided by The Muffs, Kate Bush, and the Cocteau Twins also contributed.
There is a beautiful person
living inside you!
Please share a Raspberry Psychic Lemonade
with him or her.

THANKS WIKIPEDIA!

2 comments:

Kavita said...

You know, I never got into Fruitopia. I much preferred the competition...Snapple. (Pink Lemonade to be exact). These days the thought of either makes me nauseated.

maxwell said...

I was a fan of Orbitz for a gross little while there.