Update: We reviewed it! Click here to read our review.
The citrus-flavored Surge made its comeback in 2014 and so far (knock on wood) it hasn’t been discontinued again. But for many people in the western half of the United States, it’s hard to find. If you go to the Surge website and look at the map that shows all the areas that carry the green beverage, you’ll see that folks on the eastern side of the U.S. have a much, much, much, much better chance of finding Surge.
But for those of you in the Surge-dry parts of America, Burger King has made it easier for you to get some thanks to their new Frozen Surge. The frozen beverage is available nationwide at participating locations.
A large has 120 calories, 0 grams of fat, 0 grams of saturated fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 10 milligrams of sodium, 32 grams of carbohydrates, 29 grams of sugar, and 0 grams of protein. If you’re wondering if it has caffeine, yes it does. But there doesn’t seem to be any information about how much.
If you’ve tried it, let us know what you think of it in the comments.
(Image via Burger King’s website.)
Getting it tomorrow along with the vault drink if they have it.
I had it a few days ago it’s really good
It’s weird seeing cans upon cans of surge where I am, it’s not like it sells out or anything either.
At least in my area we can’t keep it on the shelves and neither can Coke, been out for a month now.
Holy effing jesus, something that makes me want to go to BK. Give me a couple days to mentally disassociate this with other green things from BK and I’ll be good to go try this.
You are talking about the poop right
As someone who isn’t able to try surge:
How different is it from Mountain Dew? I love Mountain Dew and since there is this huge nostalgic hype around Surge the day its comeback was announced i wonder if it’s really that good… and if so… why was it discontinued in the first place? ^^
The animal it was made from went extinct.
Just playin! Even unsuccessful products can have hard core devotees. When you consider the scope of Coca-Cola’s advertising and distribution, you have to imagine some people will have developed a strong affinity for the brand. An analogy in technology would be Windows Media Center, which only about 10% of Windows users ever even launched, and only about 2% ever used regularly, but when you’re talking about 2% of 1 billion people, Microsoft still heard from millions of upset Windows users after they discontinued it.
I lived in one of the test markets for OK Soda, which is a brand I developed an affinity for. The flavor of the product was not all that great, but it was something different, and the marketing was strong enough that something in my 14-year-old brain identified with it, and so I frequently bought it. Now, even though it only lived for two years, the brand is hard-wired into my brain, and it’ll always be part of the nostalgia of my youth. If they brought it back, of course I’d buy it!
As for why Surge was discontinued, I think Coca-Cola was just trying to develop a better Mountain Dew competitor than Mello Yello. Once they realized that Surge, no matter how much money they threw into marketing, wasn’t going to be that competitor, they discontinued it. You’ve gotta remember that back in the early 2000s there wasn’t such a diversity of beverages, and there wasn’t a lot of shelf space for niche products. Nowadays grocery stores have aisles with hundreds of water, energy drink, and soda options, as well as vending machines with 30+ choices, and of course the Freestyle fountains. To resurrect the brand now was no harder than introducing a new energy drink flavor, requiring no more than one can’s width of shelf space.
To understand Surge’s appeal back in 1996, you had to have been there. I drank more Surge than I can possibly remember here (along with diet soda (ewww) and mountain dew) and nothing spiked your blood sugar quite like that.
I bought some Surge off of Amazon last year and it tasted EXACTLY as I had remembered. How many products even get that close to the originals?
I would buy more but there are just two reasons why not:
1. High Fructose Corn Syrup
I go out of my way to avoid this in any food/drink that I consume.
2. Lack of availability where I live
“real sugar” sodas are far more popular here and dare I say more popular than energy drinks. Surge would have an uphill climb as those unfamiliar with the brand’s history will likely be finickier about the taste.
It taste exactly like Mellow Yellow
As someone who tried both during Surge’s original run, it really didn’t. It’s like saying Coke/Pepsi taste the same.
I was born in 85 and had also had it during it’s original run and to me it did
Coke created Surge and advertised it to try and compete with Mountain Dew. They had Mello-Yello but it never caught on sales wise so they were attempting to jump into the “Teen Citrus Soda” market since everyone in the soda industry was noticing that Mountain Dew’s sales were starting to get just as big (or higher in some markets) than Pepsi. It was because of the higher sales that Pepsi-Co started fudging around with various flavors of Dew and came out with Code Red.
Surge did have a big following and it’s sales were decent for many years, but in the early 2000’s it started to slow down while Mountain Dew kept cranking out various flavors and it’s entire flavor line kept selling like hot-cakes. Coke tweaked the formula a bit and came up with new advertising and decided to “rebrand” it as Vault (they even made a red Vault too) but that led directly to the discontinuation of Surge, which at the time did make lots of people upset and people were writing letters and begging Coke to bring it back almost immediately after they announced it had been discontinued.
Vault didn’t reach the levels that Coke had hoped for and suddenly Diet soda’s started to become the main focus of all the major companies as people started yelling about how bad regular soda was. Coke decided to just end Vault and left itself with Mello-Yello as it’s main “citrus flavored soda” which led to them finally starting to push that and create new marketing for it. They even created a Mello-Yello Zero when the Zero version of Coke and Cherry Coke started selling heavily (however Mello-Yello Zero has become increasingly difficult to find in stores).
Well, back to Surge. It makes sense that Coke would try and have another go with it. Regular soda sales are in decline and it’s a product that people were passionately begging for them to make available again. They took a smart road by making it exclusively available on Amazon for the last year almost as a “soft test” to see how it would sell. Now that it’s been doing decently they are slowly pushing it out into markets that request it instead of going whole-hog on a full nationwide release. It’s creating demand and a large word-of-mouth campaign that they probably wouldn’t have gotten just by simply releasing it into stores and hoping for the best.
Now that BK will have it in slush form all across the country, that will probably increase demand for it even more from people wanting to try it in it’s non-slush form… thus leading to a full nationwide release of it in retail stores again and with better targeted marketing and advertising based on the slow roll out they have been doing.
For those of you who have never tasted Surge before, the easiest way to describe it would be ; think Mountain Dew but tasting a little less sugary, more citrusy. I always liked it better than Dew and am happy to see it return. I live in Michigan and so far, it’s available in all Speedway gas stations as 16oz cans for about $1 each. If you are an Amazon Prime member you can order it online through them with their Prime Pantry option. The Surge website also does have a fancy map function that will help you locate a store selling it nearby AND any BK’s that will have the slush. If you are lucky enough to get yourself some, I would highly recommend giving it a shot because who knows… it just might be lost into the soda ether once again taking up residence next to Vault, Josta, Bawls and Jolt.
Acruelly Vault did not lead to Surge’s discontinuation….Vault came out about 5 years later.
Vault was the Surge replacement but the taste was off.
Just think Burger King and coke can use this as a promotion tool for the new ghost busters movies
Hopefully someone at Coca-Cola is smart enough to resurrect Hi-C Ecto-Cooler for the movie cross-promotion.
the comments dont mean much but i never had surge like ever.. the thing is those freezes melt prerty fast.. its not worth a brain freeze but i just put it in freezer and take out after a few minutes then it can last longer.. i dont ger y plp neeed to surge their heads like that.. but becasause the west is si picky about crap i will get it and do it right..