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Before the dawn of the smoothie craze, bottled juice drinks were all the rage with busy families, teenagers, and anyone who wanted a grab-and-go drink with a little fruit flavor. Many of these drinks actually had very little fruit, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t taste great! As the years passed and these drinks were revealed as unhealthy or simply fell off in popularity, many were discontinued or phased out.
Many of of the iconic drinks below are gone or available only through mobile ordering. Seems the days of grabbing these fruity drinks at the local corner store are gone, but we haven’t forgotten our favorite old-school beverages quite yet. Here are the top discontinued fruit drinks that are gone but not forgotten. Plus, if you’re more of a soda person you might pine for these 15 Discontinued Fruit Sodas You’ll Sadly Never See Again.
SoBe drinks, once a popular beverage brand that carried multiple fruitful flavors like Black and Blue Berry Brew and Tsunami, appears to have completely disappeared from the market. Launched in 1996, it appears they’ve stopped making new products, and from the looks of comments on their social media, fans of the drink are still hoping for their return.
Released in 1981, Five Alive was one of Coca-Cola’s initial forays into the bottled juice market. A citrusy, pulpy blend of five juices, the drink was no longer produced in the U.S. by the 90s. However, Five Alive continues limited production in Canada, and you can find it online.
In 2021, Coca-Cola, which seems to dip in and out of the juice business, announced they were discontinuing Odwalla juice drinks. The bottled smoothies were initially positioned as a healthy drink (not so much), and as tastes changed, they weren’t selling well.
If you consider yourself a ’90s kid, you probably enjoyed a few bottles of this sticky sweet drink of choice for hyped-up 12-year-olds. Debuting in 1994, the juice had gone to the discontinued drinks graveyard by 2003, due to declining sales.
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In April 1999, Snapple launched a fruit drink line called Elements. The drinks were popular for several years, but sales eventually slipped which led to the end of Elements. Sort of. In 2022, the brand brought the line back, but the formula and flavors have changed.
While Gatorade will probably live forever, the retiring of the Lemon Ice flavor back in 2018, still has people complaining. There’s even a Facebook page with over 1,000 members, who trade expired versions of the drink as of last week (we really, really don’t recommend consuming expired products).
Is it water? Is it juice? Is it soda? Pretty debatable, but the Canadian drinks were a delicious favorite in the 90s. Due to mismanagement issues, they disappeared from stores in the 2000s, only to be resurrected to some extent by crowd funding. You can now order the drink from the brand’s website and in stores in Canada.
It’s debatable if anyone actually remembers, or even enjoyed, the flavor of this bright-red drink (we’re reluctant to call it a juice). The fun part everyone remembers? Squeezing the bottle to get the juice out was the highlight, and the goofy faces on those bottles. Sadly, the fun stopped in 2001.
In 1991, comedian Richard Lewis tried to convince Americans that a white grape juice drink in a super-sized juice box was a more “adult” drink. While the flavors sound appealing, not many people over the age of 11 want to be seen drinking from a juice box.
Tanya Edwards
Tanya Edwards is a seasoned food and health journalist, who has held roles at Yahoo Health as Managing Editor and at Food Network as Programming Director. Read more about Tanya
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