Ask Not for Whom the Baja Blasts

If a Baja blasts outside of Taco Bell, does it still quench your thirst?

There’s a TikTok from last summer that I love. It’s a 10-second clip of a guy at Taco Bell, filling up a Mountain Dew Baja Blast, only he’s actually diverting the stream to a tube he’s tucked inside his sleeve that’s connected to a jug hidden in a duffel bag. Simple enough! A classic soda steal. But there’s something about the composition of the video that gets me. The camerawork is shaky—it feels almost exhilarated—punctuated by a burst of desperate giggling. Mötley Crüe plays in the background. The guy at the soda machine is a glorious, awkward mess of lurching concentration, soda splashed on his sweatshirt. At the end, the video cuts to a still shot of him standing in the parking lot with his gallon of Dew, looking not so much proud as relieved.

The giddy, delirious stupidity of the whole thing is a perfect match for the experience of drinking a lot of Baja Blast.

@jweav772Bro thought he was slick#fyp #tacobell #bajablast #autismawareness

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It’s also, of course, a joke about what it takes to get a lot of Baja Blast. For years, Mountain Dew’s collaboration with Taco Bell was available only in the restaurant, a drink meant to be consumed in context. If you wanted more than could fit in a regular cup—if you dreamed of having a 2-liter bottle—too bad. The Blast flowed only from the fountains of the Bell. (For the uninitiated, it’s smoother than a regular Mountain Dew, with a jolt of what it calls “tropical lime flavor,” though I’ve always found that description lacking: The taste is tropical more so than lime, I think, juuuust this side of too sweet. It’s a beautiful shade of turquoise and is also, by far, my favorite Mountain Dew.) But its distribution has changed over the last decade, with Baja Blast available seasonally in stores like Walmart, and the July ’23 TikTok’s comments are full of people saying as much: You don’t have to do this. You can just go buy a 12-pack somewhere. You can even get it year-round at some places in Canada. Which is all true. (Even the part about Canada.) But it strikes me as completely beside the point. You could pick up some cans of Baja Blast during the summer months at Costco. But should you? No! You should seek it in its natural habitat. It is not just a drink that happened to be born via corporate partnership with Taco Bell. It’s very much a drink of Taco Bell, shaped by its environment, meant to be poured from the fountain.

But 2024 is the 20th anniversary of Baja Blast—or, in corporate parlance, the 20th Bajaversary—and it’s brought the soda wide release as a permanent retail offering. Since January 2, you have been able to enter anywhere you might buy a soda and exit with a bottle of Baja Blast, no longer required to wait for a limited spring or summer drop to find it outside a fountain at Taco Bell. Which should be great for anyone who loves Baja Blast—like, say, me.

So why do I feel so conflicted about it?

Beautiful picture of a can of Baja Blast taken this month by my friend Becca.

It’s impossible for me to think of Taco Bell without Baja Blast or vice versa. I’m not old enough to remember the former without the latter, and I cannot process a world in which the latter might have existed without the former. It’s hard to imagine any counterfactual for a pairing so perfect. Mountain Dew and Taco Bell: twin institutional pillars of a certain animated-neon-dirtbag vibe. They’re meant for each other. Maybe the most I can say is that if Taco Bell had not been the brand to pioneer commercials featuring a talking dog, Mountain Dew surely would have been the one to try it instead. (And, really, Mountain Dew eventually kind of did it anyway, with that Super Bowl commercial featuring a talking puppy-monkey-baby.) These are two sides of the same gonzo coin. Mountain Dew is the only mainstream soda brand that could make a bright turquoise drink advertised as “like drinking a real hurricane.” Taco Bell is the only restaurant that could sell a bright turquoise drink advertised as “like drinking a real hurricane.” It’s a match.

Or as Pepsi-Cola North America’s former chief marketing officer Dave Burwick told QSR Magazine¹ when Baja Blast debuted in 2004:

“Over the years, Taco Bell has helped grow the Mountain Dew brand to the point where Taco Bell customers and Mountain Dew drinkers have become kindred spirits. They are active, energetic, and constantly looking for something they can call their own.”

What a beautifully corporate way of saying, Here’s a drink engineered for high-energy weirdos. “Kindred spirits”! Indeed. But his larger point stands. Mountain Dew’s parent company, Pepsi, had been a Taco Bell partner since the 1970s, and Mountain Dew specifically was a favorite of Bell clientele. The QSR article notes that Taco Bell customers were one-and-a-half times more likely to drink Mountain Dew than the average American in 2004. But the motivation for Baja Blast was deeper than just that customer overlap. Both sides had reason for interest in trying something new. Mountain Dew had only just begun experimenting with alternate flavors—dropping Code Red (cherry) in 2001 and limited-edition LiveWire (orange) in 2003—and was curious about new ways to expand that catalog. Meanwhile, Taco Bell wanted to boost flagging beverage sales at the drive-thru, which made up an increasingly large portion of the business yet saw fewer orders of fountain drinks.

So the two parties decided they would do something drastic.

They would make a Mountain Dew people could get only at Taco Bell.

“By inventing Mountain Dew Baja Blast, Taco Bell is dangling something new, something daring, something you can’t get anywhere else,” Ken Hoffman wrote in his Drive-Thru Gourmet column in August 2004². “It’s the first soft drink that’s playing hard to get.”

It was, indeed, the first time an international beverage company and a fast-food chain partnered for an exclusive soda designed to match the menu that would not be sold elsewhere. And the rest is history. Baja Blast gained something like a cult following, then a meme following, then an enormous mainstream following. In 2008, four years after its release, it was still growing faster than any other drink option at Taco Bell. It’s only gotten bigger since.

My two recently purchased bottles of Baja Blast

That popularity is partially just because it’s good. You might love Baja Blast even if you’re not a Mountain Dew-head. The lime flavor isn’t too obvious—I mean, Mountain Dew is citrus-y to begin with, anyway—but it works to cut the sweetness of the original. All due respect to the corporate tagline, I don’t think Baja Blast is like drinking a real hurricane. It’s more like being at the pool; it’s fun, laidback, not too intense. And the rest of its popularity feels almost self-evident. Come on: It’s an unnaturally turquoise soda with a silly name designed to be sold at Taco Bell! It’s a joke, until it isn’t, and it hits whether you think it’s an ironic choice or a totally serious one.

But a key part of that is “designed to be sold at Taco Bell.” That’s what makes the whole thing go. It’s a corporate partnership, a marketing concept, yes, but it’s one that works; the idea of these two together is obvious and funny and stupid in the best way. Mountain Dew has tried to replicate that relationship. The last few years have brought Mountain Dew Southern Shock at Bojangles, Mountain Dew Sweet Lightning at KFC, Mountain Dew Legend at Buffalo Wild Wings, Mountain Dew “Dewgarita” at Red Lobster, Mountain Dew Vibe at Which Wich?, Mountain Dew Dark Berry Bash at Applebee’s. Some of these actually taste pretty good. But none of them work for me on a conceptual level. Read that list again! Mountain Dew Sweet Lightning at KFC? Mountain Dew “Dewgarita” at Red Lobster?? Mountain Dew Dark Berry Bash at Applebee’s??? That is a fake corporate synergy idea from an episode of 30 Rock. That is not a Mountain Dew flavor with an existential purpose. It’s not a drink with a sense of place. Compare that to Baja Blast. It’s a soda that could spring into creation only at Taco Bell and, in my mind, can unlock its true potential only at Taco Bell. I do not have to question its purpose. I understand it intimately.

But in the summer of 2014, for its 10th anniversary, Baja Blast was sold in stores for the first time, part of a promo called “Baja or Bust.” (If you are not versed in the wonderfully dumb promotional language of Mountain Dew, get ready, because this paragraph is full of it.) The release of cans and bottles was deemed a success and repeated in 2015. To get back in stores the next year, however, Baja Blast would have to win the DEWcision election in 2016, intended to decide which limited-edition retail flavor would become permanent. (Do note that DEWcision [2016] differs from DEWmocracy [2008].) “Long-time Baja Blast fans had waited for this moment to come and took it to the next level,” reads the Baja Blast page of the Mountain Dew Wiki. Alas! Those long-time fans lost out to fans of Mountain Dew Pitch Black. This meant Baja Blast would not come back to stores until 2018, but it’s been an annual drop ever since, its releases growing steadily more extreme. The last few years have brought splashy campaigns—100 Days of Baja in 2021, The Lost Treasures of Baja Island in ‘22, Summer of Baja Blast in ‘23—with a slew of limited-release flavors: Baja Flash, Baja Punch, Baja Mango Gem, Baja Gold, Baja Blast ENERGY, Baja Deep Dive, Baja Caribbean Splash, Baja Passionfruit Punch. It’s an exhausting list that speaks for itself. Mountain Dew took Baja Blast and tried going bigger, weirder, fruitier, more caffeinated, more alcoholic, more exclusive. It had just one place left to go.

So now, for the Bajaversary, we have received the traditional 20th anniversary gift: permanent wide release of the original soda in cans and bottles in stores. (With the caveat that “permanent” can mean any number of things in the Mountain Dew promotional universe—permanent, or available for a few years, or perhaps for just one year.) I had never previously sought Baja Blast outside Taco Bell. The limited drops were never appealing to me; I didn’t want to bother with calendars and online supply trackers when I could just check the location of the nearest Taco Bell. I didn’t want cans in my fridge. This wasn’t a home soda. It was a treat, meant to come from the fountain, probably with friends, maybe late at night. I didn’t think I’d want it any other way.

But earlier this week, I walked into a CVS. They had 12-packs of Baja Blast cans; I settled on a pair of 20-oz bottles, one regular, one zero sugar.

It tasted great. It was missing something.

1. It’s *the* business-to-business magazine for the limited-service restaurant segment!

2. The column was nationally syndicated; the best headline for it, by far, came from the Intelligencer Journal of Lancaster, PA: “Taco Bell, Dew create one liquid asset”