Tag: Mystery Flavor

REVIEW: Fanta What the Fanta Mystery Flavor 2023

Marvo 37 Comments

Fanta’s 2023 version of its What the Fanta Mystery Flavor has two mysteries attached to it. Of course, the first one is its flavor. And the second one is: Why don’t the cans glow in the dark?

The light green colored graphics over a black background make me think they’re glow-in-the-dark, but they’re not, despite my attempts to charge the possible glowy parts by putting a can next to a window for a time much longer than it would take for me to just Google the answer. While the cans don’t glow, the soda makes your tongue turn black or dark purple, especially in a dark room.

It smells orangey or citrusy, but it’s dark purple in color. With the first few sips, my guesses switched between grape and orange. But I think its color confused my head because there’s no way this is grape-flavored, right? There’s no mystery there. That would be like Sherlock Holmes in a mystery called “The Case of the Murderer Who Instantly Admitted It and There Are Dozens of Witnesses, Plus There’s Video Evidence From Every Angle Taken By Those Dozens of Witnesses.” It’s not that simple, right?

So my guess is orange, which sounds so basic that it’s got to be some kind of unique orange or orange-flavored product. The artificial sweetener aftertaste kind of hits me the same way as fruity, chalky candy does. So maybe it’s orange Smarties or Sweetarts? Or perhaps it’s Orange Fanta with a lot of Red 40 and Blue 1 food coloring. If that’s the case, WTF, Fanta?

A QR code on the side of the can leads to a website, but I didn’t visit it because I didn’t want to take the chance that it would give away the answer. I’ll just wait until it’s officially announced.

But is this orange candy-flavored soda good? It’s okay. Usually, I don’t mind zero sugar sodas, but there’s something about this one that makes it less appealing. It could be the artificial sweetener aftertaste I mentioned earlier that leads to a chalky candy-like sensation. Or maybe I taste the disappointment of the cans not glowing in the dark.

Purchased Price: More than one should pay on eBay
Size: 7.5 oz cans (also available in 20 oz bottles)
Purchased at: eBay
Rating: 6 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (1 can) 0 calories, 0 grams of fat, 40 milligrams of sodium, 0 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of sugar, and 0 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Mystery Flavor Fruit Roll-Ups

Erin 5 Comments

General Mills is rebranding its fruit snacks to suit the modern era of lunchbox-toting kids and teens, but in the case of these Mystery Flavor Fruit Roll-Ups, it feels like it went with such a ’90s vibe that it’s targeting the parents and not the offspring. This pack leans entirely on a “weird green guys from outer space” theme that I can’t imagine resonating with today’s kids. But what do I know? The packaging is metallic, and I’ll be damned if weird alien cartoons and shiny things don’t intrigue me.

The pack includes two flavors, Mystery and Solar Melon. I was briefly disappointed that half of these were melon because it gives you fewer chances to guess the mystery flavor. If you’re not familiar with Fruit Roll-Ups, I would describe the flavor of all of them as “This is definitely a Fruit Roll-Up,” but if you can tell the difference between a berry one and whatever the Tie-Dye is, you’re a better person than me. Fruit Roll-Ups are a snack to be eaten as quickly as possible because if they’re fresh, they’re so sticky that you can barely get the plastic off before they collapse in your hand. Definitely do not put them on a plate to photograph like I did. The time from thinking you might give it a taste test to the time you’ve determined that you’d better just shove it all in your mouth before you never get it unstuck from you again is about 8 seconds.

Trying the Mystery flavor, I couldn’t get beyond that it just tasted like I expected a Fruit Roll-Up to taste. Delicious, but overall…normal. Maybe this whole alien theme was a ruse? Maybe space tastes like Fruit Roll-Ups? I didn’t have a clue. Luckily part of this rebranding is a focus on trying to interact beyond the eating of the snack, so General Mills wants you to visit its website, where you can vote on what the flavor is.

Thank Area 51, we have some parameters!

Faced with the choices of Cosmic Citrus Swirl, Stellar Strawberry Peach, Galactic Grape, and Mango Martian, things started to make sense, and I felt pretty confident choosing Strawberry Peach. The strawberry is the classic and dominant flavor, but there’s a little more there, and it will remind you of Peach Rings.

To its credit, the unmysterious Solar Melon is a perfect shade of alien-green and a welcome addition to the box. It manages to taste like a blend of fruits with a melon focus but not in an overly artificial way like many watermelon candies.

The sheets are printed with tongue tattoos in various alien, UFO, and space designs. Because eating a Fruit Roll-Up inherently involves playing with your food, I went ahead and applied a UFO-XING sign to my tongue. It worked like a charm, and by that I mean it left my tongue with an unintelligible giant blue blob on it. You can thank me later for not including that photo. It might not be the most original attempt at a mystery flavor, but eating these is a fun and tasty way to spend two minutes, and who knows, you might win a galactic fanny pack before you’re beamed back up to the mothership.

Purchased Price: $2.29
Size: 10-count box of 0.5 oz rolls
Purchased at: Mariano’s
Rating: 8 out of 10 (Mystery Flavor), 7 out of 10 (Solar Melon)
Nutrition Facts: (1 roll) 50 calories, 1 gram of total fat, 0.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 50 milligrams of sodium, 12 grams of total carbohydrates, 7 grams of sugar (including 7 grams of added sugar), and 0 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Mtn Dew Baja Deep Dive

Jenna 3 Comments

Mtn Dew Baja Deep Dive Can

This review started with seven simple words, texted by my partner as he checked our mail: “Hey, did you order an exclusive Dew?”

I hadn’t… but my confusion quickly gave way to unadulterated joy. A month or so prior, I’d tracked down all three of Summer 2022’s Baja flavors — the OG and its new and surprisingly-elusive-in-my-neck-of-the-woods friends Baja Mango Gem and Baja Gold — diligently plugged the codes on their caps into Mountain Dew’s website for a stab at the Lost Treasures of Baja Island sweepstakes, and then summarily forgotten all about it… until I returned home triumphant to a coveted six-pack of my Baja Deep Dive winnings!

Mtn Dew Baja Deep Dive Box

Sure, it sounds a little less impressive when I specify that I’m a mere one of 18,000 beverage buffs who got lucky this time around, but still, free, surprise, only-available-from-a-contest Mountain Dew straight to one’s doorstep is nothing to scoff at!

Mtn Dew Baja Deep Dive Glass

I eagerly cracked open a tall, spiffy dark purple can of this subnautical nectar, which is decorated with what seems to be an artist’s interpretation of what normal fish would mutate into if oceans were made of Mountain Dew. A poison-dart-frog-bright, slightly bluish green (appropriately, one could even call it “sea green”) liquid whose hue I can best describe as “Yep, that sure is Mountain Dew-colored” pulsed out.

The perplexing potion smelled deliciously — and aggressively — fruity, candy-like even, but not in a way that I could immediately attribute to any particular flavor. If you’re familiar with Mountain Dew, such sugar-soaked ambiguity is probably not surprising. It is probably also not surprising when I report that this aquatic libation tastes… pretty much how just it smells. It’s violently sweet and heavily reminiscent of its citrus-y, mango-y, pineapple-y Baja brethren, but with a strange aftertaste that, bizarrely, reminded me of cucumber. A thorough sweep of the pleasantly active Mountain Dew community on Reddit suggests that I may literally be the only person in the world who thought that. Neat!

Mtn Dew Baja Deep Dive Descript

Oh yeah, did I mention this is a mystery flavor? As of late I’ve been on an equally amused and bemused quest to try as many flavors of Dew as possible, but nevertheless, I haven’t yet developed the skill of actually being able to differentiate between them very well. So, when it came to cracking this maritime mystery, I was a bit lost at sea.

Mtn Dew Baja Deep Dive Graphics

A deep dive into, well, Deep Dive produced a few hints that were as well-buried as a hidden treasure. Notably, there is a diver on the can whose mask looks like a pineapple, but that was about all I could fish up on my lonesome. (The can also prominently features, among other things, an eel, an anglerfish, and what appears to be a sentient grenade with a narwhal horn, so I hope those aren’t also clues about the ingredients at play here!)

Fortunately, the trusty True Dew-ers of the internet have also unearthed the tantalizing tidbit that the font used on this can is the same as on the dearly departed Mountain Dew Pitch Black, which was grape flavored. Come to think of it, aren’t sea grapes a thing? If that somehow ends up being this flavor’s secret identity, Team Mountain Dew deserves a hearty tip of my pirate’s hat (but maybe also an eye roll).

All in all, the allure of this oceanic new edition, just like the allure of any Mountain Dew, is both difficult to describe and difficult to deny.

Purchased Price: Free as a sweepstakes prize
Size: 16 oz cans
Purchased at: n/a, only available to winners of the Lost Treasures of Baja Island sweepstakes
Rating: 7 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (1 can) 220 calories, 0 grams of fat, 0 grams of saturated fat, 65 milligrams of sodium, 59 grams of carbohydrates, 59 grams of sugar, 0 grams of protein, and 72 milligrams of caffeine.

REVIEW: Limited Edition 2022 Mtn Dew VooDEW

Marvo 30 Comments

Limited Edition 2022 Mtn Dew VooDEW Bottle

It’s specDEWlation time! It’s the annual Mtn Dew VooDEW Mystery Flavor Guessing Game! If the previous three years are hints, it’ll be candy. In 2019, it was candy corn. In 2020, it was Skittles-like. In 2021, it was Starburst-like. In 2022… it’s, well, let’s find out.

First off, this smells like Skittles. But there’s no way VooDEW will taste like original Skittles for a second time, right?

So it’s sour, and I taste lemon and some berry, which got me thinking it might be Sour Skittles. Or it could be Sour Patch Kids, although now that I think about it, it might not be because it’s not as sour, and the lemon and berry flavors don’t remind me of the candy. Um, kind of wondering if it could be Lemonheads and, um, Berry Lemonheads? Are berry Lemonheads a thing, and are Lemonheads considered a Halloween candy?

Sour and fruity. Kind of thinking it might taste like a roll of Smarties. It’s a standard Halloween candy because I remember getting it as a kid and putting it in the unwanted candy pile after a night of Trick-or-Treating. They’re usually given out by heartless people. That’s still the case, right? Let me think about what else this could be. Extra caffeine is needed beyond the 91 milligrams in this bottle to help me think. SweeTarts?

Limited Edition 2022 Mtn Dew VooDEW Pour

All right. After pondering, I will base my guess mostly on how it smells. I believe this year’s Mtn Dew VooDEW Mystery Flavor is…Sour Skittles. Oh crap! I forgot to hide my guess using primitive cryptography in the paragraphs above. Argh!

While I’m not 100 percent sure what this year’s VooDEW tastes like, I do know this is one tasty Dew. I love the 2020 version that tasted like Skittles and this one equally. I also love the sourness and how it reminds me of Mtn Dew Pitch Black (which is rumored to return this year).

Limited Edition 2022 Mtn Dew VooDEW History

I hope Mtn Dew never stops with the mystery flavors. It would sadden me if they did quit like other brands.

NOTE: This year’s VooDEW is also available in a Zero Sugar version.

Purchased Price: More than anyone should pay for a bottle of soda
Size: 20 oz bottle
Purchased at: eBay
Rating: 9 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (1 bottle) 270 calories, 0 grams of fat, 95 milligrams of sodium, 72 grams of carbohydrates, 72 grams of sugar (including 72 grams of added sugar), and 0 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Fanta What The Fanta Mystery Flavor

Jenna 26 Comments

Fanta What The Fanta Mystery Flavor Bottle

I should start off by explaining/apologizing for how, when I recently finished a thriller whose twist ending blew my mind, I was quickly informed by online reviews that I was the only person in the world who hadn’t seen it coming by the third page. Please bear that in mind when I tell you that I had no idea what to make of my first sip of Fanta’s What The Fanta Mystery Flavor. It smelled like Marshmallow Fruity Pebbles, looked like dishwasher detergent, and tasted like a sudden inability to remember a single other flavor to which I could compare it.

After a few addled attempts, I realized that it reminded me of Fresca, the zero-calorie drink known to me throughout my childhood as equally for its sparklingly synthetic taste as for its inexplicable presence at every gathering my dad’s side of the family ever held. Fresca was grapefruit-flavored, but I don’t think the same can be said of this blue beauty. I don’t drink much sugar-free soda, so that was just one of my few frames of reference for the bright, biting, and ever-so-uncannily artificial flavor that overwhelmed any other tastes I might detect here.

Still, “fruit of some sort” seemed like a promising start, and I kicked into detective mode to find more leads.

My first clue was a message on the bottle that read, appropriately, “Find Clues: #WhatTheFanta.” Attempting to follow those directions immediately led to me drowning in a sea of disgruntled Twitter users comparing this soda’s taste, with varying degrees of tact, to a rear end. (Fortunately, another recurring guess was the way more helpful — not to mention plausible — “orange creamsicle”).

Eventually, I made my way to Fanta.com, an oasis of information where, for the price of my email address and birthday, I was granted access to a secret world by way of QR code.

Spoilers ahead!

Fanta What The Fanta Mystery Flavor Glass

The QR code transports you to a mysterious website where you’re greeted by an array of images: first, there is just an innocuous blue Fanta bottle, which quickly reconfigures itself into an ice cream truck, a weird bluish blob that I initially parsed as an octopus but eventually realized was probably meant to be a stylized scoop of ice cream, an ice cream cone (okay, I thought I got it!!!), an ear of corn (never mind, I was confused again!!!), a carrot, a traffic cone, and finally some sort of reddish donkey-thing.

The three pieces of ice cream imagery and the two iconically orange items lend a lot of credence to the orange creamsicle theory, but I must admit I still have no idea how the corn or donkey play into it. I guess if the cerulean color for an ostensibly orange flavor is any indication, Fanta isn’t above throwing in a few red (or blue) herrings (or donkeys).

So, that’s the mystery of the flavor resolved (probably). What about the resolution of this review? Unfortunately, the tinny tang that comes along with the “zero sugar” label meant that I regrettably found the QR code caper more compelling than the actual beverage that inspired it. Drink this if you’re thirsty for a good case to crack, but perhaps not if you’re thirsty for a good soda.

Update: We also tried the Burger King Frozen What The Fanta! Click here to read our review.

Purchased Price: $2.19
Size: 20 oz
Purchased at: Wawa
Rating: 4 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (1 bottle) 0 calories, 0 grams of fat, 65 milligrams of sodium, 0 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of sugar, and 0 grams of protein.