End-of-Summer Soda

A Fresca for the last gasp of the season

Hello! This issue will mostly be about Fresca, but first, sorry for my newsletter truancy: I spent most of the last two weeks consumed by a project. On a soda-related note, I realized at one point when I thought I was going to have to pull an all-nighter that my fridge had three different varieties of Diet Coke, each purchased on its own on a separate shopping trip—all fueled by my most persistently financially ruinous thought—“I just want a little treat”:

Here we have several key members of the Diet Coke family: a standard can of Diet Coke, a tall boy Diet Coke, and a mini glass bottle Diet Coke.

None of these is foreign to my fridge, but it’s rare for all three to be in there at once, which got me weirdly excited to structure my night of work around a narrative arc of Diet Coke. (Excited enough to get them all out of the fridge for a picture first, anyway.) (It probably goes without saying that I was at the point of working intently on something for long enough to be fully deranged in all other aspects of my life.) I figured I’d start with the regular DC, savor the tall boy over the course of the night, and turn to the mini glass bottle as a reward to provide one final boost once the end was in sight. What actually happened was I started drinking the tall boy, got too absorbed in my work and let it sit out and get flat, and later chugged the regular DC. I somehow did not have to stay up all night, and the mini glass bottle is still in my fridge, waiting for me. Anyway! That is not what this newsletter is about.

No, this newsletter is about the perfect time to drink a Fresca, and why that time ended last weekend.

I’m a longtime FrescaHead. For the uninitiated, the soda is citrus-y, but not in a lemon-lime-forward way: Fresca doesn’t have the zip of a Sprite or Mountain Dew or Starry or anything in that extended family. Instead, the carbonation here is lighter, and the main citrus flavor is grapefruit. That makes it a generally smoother and more pleasant drinking experience, I think. It’s zero-calorie and was traditionally marketed as a diet drink; they no longer really emphasize this, but they have introduced a bunch of visual cues to make you think it might be a seltzer if you don’t know better, including separating the word “sparkling” from “soda water” and styling it in a flowy cursive. This was part of a redesign a few years ago that made the can look vaguely European. I am not a fan. Reject modernity, embrace tradition!

New(ish) can aside, I remain a devoted Fresca fan, and I’ve realized something over the last few years. This is the ideal summer soda.

I cannot begin to describe how much I hate this can redesign. Who do you think you are? A San Pellegrino???

Any ice-cold soda can be great in the summer, obviously: The refreshment is a virtue of temperature as much as flavor. But there’s something about the agreeable, just-sweet-enough buzz of a Fresca—the idea that in a matter of thirst-quenching seconds, you could easily slam the whole thing back, though of course you won’t—that feels especially well-suited to the season. If citrus sodas generally have a summery connotation, I still think Fresca has one that you don’t see in Sprite or Starry, which feel season-independent to me: It’s the sweetness, I think? Leading with grapefruit rather than a more high-powered note such as lemon or lime makes Fresca seem more refreshing, less aggressive. And it turns out I’m not alone in feeling this way! Fresca’s entire initial marketing campaign was based around the idea that it was ultra-cool and refreshing. Take a look from 1966:

This ran in the The Courier-Post of Camden, N.J. in August 1966, as pulled from Newspapers.com. Fresca’s first full year on the market! There was also a TV commercial with a blizzard-themed jingle.

Kudos to the copywriter here: “Fresca is the new cold drink with the frosty, cold taste. And, of course, it’s sugar-free. How refreshing is Fresca? This refreshing: icy, biting, bold, cold, frosty, wintry, shivering, shuddering, springy, sparkling, chilling, lively, light, brisk, bubbling, nearly freezing, and almost shocking.” I would use, like, five of these 17 descriptors to characterize a Fresca today. But I get the vision. “Try the frosty taste of Fresca,” the ad finishes. “It’s a blizzard.” The perfect answer for a hot summer day.

I had a Fresca outside this weekend—temperature in the high 70s, sun bearing down, still very much like summer but with the light shifted just enough to hint at fall—and realized it might be the last one for the season. This was the perfect way to drink it, I figured, up on my rooftop while that still felt decently seasonally appropriate. Icy, biting, bold, cold, frosty, wintry, shivering, shuddering, springy, sparkling, chilling, lively, light, brisk, bubbling, nearly freezing, but not at all shocking. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.