Crystal Pepsi

Crystal Pepsi is a clear cola soft drink made by PepsiCo. It was initially released in the United States and Canada from 1992 to 1994. Online grassroots revival efforts prompted brief re-releases throughout the mid-2010s. It was briefly sold in the United Kingdom and Australia. Its flavor resembles standard Pepsi, without caramel color, reportedly making it taste less "acidic". History Background The clear craze, a global marketing fad in the 1980s and 1990s, equated clarity with purity, reaching basic retail markets with the reintroduction of Ivory soap with a marketing slogan of "99 and 44/100 percent pure". Meanwhile, soft drink sales boomed in the 1980s with popularization of diet drinks, but in 1991 slowed to a 1.8% growth rate. Pepsi-Cola North America CEO Craig Weatherup was ambitiously internally restructuring the company while launching a multi-faceted development and marketing plan to expand as a "total beverage company". This included the fast-growing and expandable New Age beverage market, with established competition from Clearly Canadian (reportedly having "built a new market in two years"), Nordic Mist, Snapple, and the waning Original New York Seltzer. PepsiCo was reportedly "a lot more free-thinking and willing to make errors ... [already having] made some very good errors".