Crystal Pepsi’s Transparent Terror
Crystal Pepsi was launched in 1992 with a huge marketing campaign and to great success, capturing a 1% soft drink market share worth US$474 million in its first year. But here’s what nobody talks about anymore – this clear cola was actually one of the early 2000s most confusing culinary experiments that somehow made it to shelves nationwide. Customers described the beverage as bland and watery. The whole concept was built on replacing caramel coloring with modified cornstarch, creating a drink that looked like water but supposedly tasted like cola.
By late 1993, Crystal Pepsi was discontinued, and the final batches were delivered to retailers during the first few months of 1994. The drink’s failure had as much to do with psychology as taste – our brains are literally programmed to associate brown cola with the familiar flavor we expect. When you remove that visual cue, everything falls apart faster than you can say “refreshing.”
Heinz EZ Squirt Ketchup in Shocking Colors
Heinz’s oddly-colored EZ Squirt Ketchup captivated children with its bizarre purple and green variants, reportedly selling millions of bottles before parents rejected the unnatural hues. This wasn’t just about making food fun – it was about completely destroying the visual experience of eating. Picture this: you’re at a barbecue in 2003, and some kid squirts bright green ketchup all over their hot dog. If you were a child in the 2000s, you probably begged the adult in your life to buy you Heinz EZ Squirt Ketchup. It tasted exactly like normal ketchup, except it wasn’t red! It came in shades of purple and green and made your food look absolutely disgusting.
The strangest part? Parents actually bought this stuff in massive quantities. There’s something deeply unsettling about purple ketchup that makes even the most adventurous eaters question their life choices. The trend died out because parents realized that making food look like it belonged in a science lab wasn’t actually improving family dinner time.
The Bacon-Everything Explosion
By the 2000s, diet trends had shifted from low-fat to high-protein, and Americans took that as an excuse to eat bacon in every form imaginable. One memorable product born out of the country’s cured pork obsession was the maple bacon doughnut. Voodoo Donuts in Portland, Oregon, helped catapult this sweet-and-salty treat to national fame when they debuted it in 2003. But the bacon trend went way beyond donuts.
Bacon is definitely not just for breakfast anymore. Fueled in part by an interest in salty-sweet pairings during the early 2000s, we began to see crispy bacon bits adorning chocolate and maple cupcakes, hot fudge sundaes, chocolate chip cookies and glazed donuts. Suddenly, bacon was appearing in ice cream, candy bars, and even cocktails. The trend was so intense that restaurants started having “bacon nights” where they’d serve bacon-wrapped everything. It was like someone decided that regular food wasn’t exciting enough unless it had pork fat sprinkled on top.
Color-Changing Yoplait Go-Gurt Yogurt
These came out in the ’90s but lasted into the 2000s, and boy did I love them! The white yogurt had a sealed pouch on the lid that peeled back to reveal a surprise color powder. You sprinkled the powder into your yogurt and it changed color. This wasn’t just yogurt – it was a science experiment disguised as a snack. Kids would spend more time mixing colors than actually eating the product.
Did it taste good? Meh. Was it fun? Yes! The whole concept played into parents’ desire to make healthy foods more exciting for kids, but it also normalized the idea that food should be interactive entertainment rather than just nutrition. Looking back, it was basically the beginning of the “food as content” era that eventually led to elaborate Instagram-worthy dishes.
Matcha Kit Kats Taking Over Japan
Kit Kat first debuted in England in 1935, but the 2000s were when Japan fell in love with the flavored versions of the treat. Matcha Kit Kats first appeared in the country in 2004, and they were a massive success. By mixing matcha powder with chocolate, Nestlé was able to create a Kit Kat that tasted like no other. Today, the green tea-flavored Kit Kat is the second-most popular variety in Japan behind classic milk chocolate.
But here’s the weird part – this trend never really caught on in America during the 2000s, even though we were obsessed with other strange flavor combinations. The matcha Kit Kat represented a completely different approach to weird food trends. Instead of making things artificially colorful or extremely sweet, Japan was experimenting with sophisticated flavor combinations that actually worked. It’s like they were playing chess while we were playing tic-tac-toe with our food.
Altoids Sours’ Cult Following
Altoids Sours (2004-2010) presented a tangy spin-off of the traditional Altoids mints in distinctive round tins with gem-shaped, sugar-dusted candy pieces. Available in five flavors (tangerine, raspberry, lime, apple, and mango), they developed such a passionate cult following that unopened tins became collectors’ items, with vintage tins selling for inflated prices online after their discontinuation.
When Altoids Sours were discontinued, the reaction from fans was both immediate and passionate. The fervor of the fans was such that some collectors even sought out expired tins on secondary markets like eBay, where prices soared to staggering heights. This collector mentality underscored the strong emotional connection that consumers had with Altoids Sours – a product that had become a symbol of a particular era in candy culture. The obsession with these little sour candies was so intense that it bordered on religious devotion. People would hoard tins like they were preparing for the apocalypse.
Dippin’ Dots as “Ice Cream of the Future”
Dippin’ Dots debuted in 1988 with a unique flash-freezing process that transforms milk, sugar, eggs, and cream into miniature spheres of super-chilled ice cream beads. Scooped out from hibernation and into a colorful plastic cup, the little frozen beads cling to your tongue before melting into the familiar flavors of strawberry, chocolate, vanilla, and cookie dough. Its next kiosk was at the Kennedy Space Center, where the phrase “ice cream of the future” was coined.
By the fall of 1998, you could find Dippin’ Dots in 350 outlets across 42 states. The Joneses expanded aggressively by placing coolers in malls, amusement parks, and stadiums nationwide. The brand spawned a franchise program, cementing Dippin’ Dots as a mall-and-theme-park staple for an entire generation of kids. The weird thing about Dippin’ Dots was that eating them felt like consuming tiny frozen BBs. You couldn’t just bite into them like normal ice cream – they demanded a completely different eating technique.
Jelly Belly BeanBoozled’s Gross-Out Game
Thanks to Harry Potter’s Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavored Beans, weird jelly bean flavors were all the rage in the 2000s. In 2007, the Jelly Belly Candy Company turned gross-out candy into a diabolical game with its first Beanboozled line. Every box mixes nasty jelly beans with Jelly Belly’s classic flavors. Some of the more stomach-turning varieties produced for the brand include booger, dead fish, and dog food.
This wasn’t just candy – it was Russian roulette for your taste buds. Kids would dare each other to eat beans that might taste like vomit or grass, creating a whole social ritual around potential disgust. The trend tapped into something primal about childhood dares and the thrill of potentially eating something horrible. It was like Fear Factor, but for eight-year-olds with twenty-five cents.
Orbitz Drinks with Floating Balls
The early 2000s gave us Orbitz, a clear beverage with colorful gelatin balls floating inside like a lava lamp you could drink. These drinks looked more like science experiments than beverages, with little spheres suspended in flavored liquid that would bounce around when you shook the bottle. The texture was completely bewildering – you’d get regular liquid mixed with chewy balls that had no business being in a drink.
The strangest part wasn’t just the floating balls, but how the marketing tried to make them seem sophisticated and futuristic. People would spend more time playing with the floating spheres than actually drinking the beverage. The trend died out because nobody could figure out if they were supposed to chew the balls or just swallow them whole, and the experience was more confusing than refreshing.
The 2000s were a wild time for food experimentation, when companies thought the weirder something looked, the more likely kids would beg their parents to buy it. These trends reflected our collective willingness to eat anything that promised to be different, even if different meant completely abandoning logic or taste. Did you expect food to be this bizarre back then?
