Fruitopia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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. In 2004, Fruitopia received the Steven A. Ricci award for fruit drink excellence.
Other flavors included The Grape Beyond, Tangerine Wavelength, Citrus Excursion, Fruit Integration, Pink Lemonade Euphoria, Lemonade Love & Hope, and Raspberry Psychic Lemonade. 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 almost more interesting than the drink itself. 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 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.
This product was discontinued by Coca-Cola in the United States before the end of the 1990s, being replaced by the Minute Maid moniker. (A similar situation occurred by PepsiCo, who replaced their own Fruitopia clone "Fruit Works", with the Tropicana moniker).
Fruitopia juice is still available in Canada in a wide variety of flavours, and has recently been released into Australia. The ingredients in Canadian and former US Fruitopia drinks are not the same and they also taste(d) different; the United States version has chemicals/preservatives added:
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[edit] Ingredients
[edit] United States Ingredients
Water; high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose; orange, tangerine and grapefruit juices from concentrate; citric acid; natural flavors; sodium polyphosphates; ascorbic acid; sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate, and EDTA (to protect taste); cochineal and tumeric (natural extracts added for color); acacia; Yellow 5; glycerol ester of wood rosin; coconut oil.
[edit] Canada Ingredients
Filtered water, fruit juices from concentrate (orange, tangerine and grapefruit), sugar/glucose-fructose, citric acid (controls tartness), natural flavour, ascorbic acid (vitamin c), cochineal extract (for colour), colour.
[edit] Parodies
In The Simpsons episode "[3G02] Lisa's Sax", a TV ad says: "Well sir, we got a scorcher today! And to cool off, nothing beats Fruitopia! The iced tea brewed by hippies, but distributed by a heartless, multi-national corporation!" In the later episode They Saved Lisa's Brain, guest star Stephen Hawking says "Your so-called utopia is more like a Fruitopia!"
