A&W Ice Cream Sundae

 

Product circa: 2025

This was one of the hardest products to find in my history of ephemeral noms; I searched for it specifically during a few weekends around town before I finally found it.

In short, it's cream soda with chocolate added.  There's also a distinct flavor of the the type of marshmallows you'll find in cereal.  It's genius, honestly... why wouldn't you add chocolate to cream soda?  I guess chocolate soda is a foreign enough concept to consumers that most people wouldn't try it?  And the cleverest part of this stuff is that just enough citric acid is added to make the flavors blossom.  Without the acid, I imagine this would be flat and boring.

Anyway, the biggest disappointment is that A&W didn't use their root beer base for this.  A long time ago, I seem to recall being able to order root beer with a chocolate flavor add-in at Sonic Drive-In.  Cuz why not??

Sprite Chill Mango Citrus

 

Product circa: spring 2026

Coca-Cola is expanding the Sprite Chill line, and I am here for it.

Mango almost always works in mass market sodas like these, and this is no exception.  It's hard to tell if any additional citrus was added to this mix... I might guess grapefruit if my life depended on it.  Overall, this tastes exceedingly tropical and is very satisfying.

Supposedly the Sprite Chill line uses a proprietary blend of "cooling agents" to make the liquid feel even colder in the mouth and throat, ala menthol, but I'm not even sure I can detect it.

Planters Ranch and Sweet Cayenne BBQ

 

Products circa: summer 2026

I'm late in the year to report on these semiquincentennial snacks from July.  As rare editions of Planters peanuts, these are essentially cocktail peanuts with potato chip-esque flavor powders added to them.  Not that I am complaining... flavored nut mixes are rare around these parts, for some reason.

Ranch: I'm not a ranch guy, but these are alright.  Any cool ranch Doritos fans would gobble these up.

Sweet Cayenne BBQ: These are more special; I've bought several of these since July.  Not only does the barbecue flavor work better on peanuts than ranch, the barbecue seasoning on these are a step above anything I've tasted on a chip.  You have the sweet molasses/tomato base like usual, but the smokiness here is something I haven't tasted since the old Lay's KC Masterpiece chips.  On top of that, there is a noticeable mustard component to these, which is reflected on the ingredients list.  A complex masterpiece for a peanut snack.  What a shame that these will probably never be produced again.

Cheetos The Flavor of Fear

 

Product circa: Halloween 2026

A very interesting Halloweeny take on the rare sweet-style Cheetos snack.  These are basically cinnamon-sugar Cheetos puffs with a hefty amount of chile powder on them.  I'm not a huge fan of cinnamon-sugar snacks, but the chile adds enough savoriness to make these interesting and hard to put down.  What will make you put them down, however, is the heat.  I'm very impressed with the heat level of these, and after a few puffs, you'll need to take a break to cool down.

Pringles Smoky Bacon & Smoky Cheddar

 

Products circa: 2026

Smoky Bacon: An MSG bomb with savory flavors, especially onion.  Interestingly, coffee powder is on the ingredient list.  There is a pleasant smoky flavor that manages to simulate bacon quite well, considering there is no meat product in the ingredients.

Smoky Cheddar: This was an instant pick-up, as Pringles always does with with cheese-related flavors.  In the end, there isn't a ton of smoke in these... probably to avoid disappointing your average normie customer.  But they're still delicious.  The light touch of smoke doesn't quite register as smoke, and instead just makes the cheese flavor more interesting.  Awesome!

Crush Electric Blue Razz

 

Product circa: 2024-2025

A nostalgic throwback... was blue raspberry really that popular in the 1980s?  Anyway...

I'm a big fan of blue raspberry, and it took a lot of effort on my part to find this product.  But in the end... it's not quite what I wanted.  They made this formula decidedly sour, whereas my fickle ass wanted something sweet, in this one instance.  I'm impossible to please.  But this is still a very fun product, and tasty, and one of the few blue raspberry sodas to have ever existed.

Fanta Crimson Sour Cherry

Product circa: spring 2026

A promotion with the 2026 video game Diablo IV.

I'm not a cherry soda fan, really, but the sourness here is perfectly balanced with the sweetness that would otherwise be overpowering.  This shit is good.  If I see any residual 12 packs of this, I'm going to buy one.