Pepsi Is Planning To Release A Strange New Soda Flavor Thanks To Twitter

While seasonal sodas don't get the love that holiday-themed coffee drinks and even cocktails do, they're still a kind-of-sort-of thing, at least for two soda brands: Mountain Dew and Pepsi. Mountain Dew's got their Merry Mash-Up, a surprisingly divisive cranberry/pomegranate flavor, and next year they plan to drop a gingerbread-flavored Dew. Pepsi's gotten in the game in past years with the not-so-successful Holiday Spice flavor, while this year saw Pepsi Apple Pie just in time for Thanksgiving. Sadly this newest flavor was only available if you won a social media contest related to baking fails — it seems their version of apple pie in a bottle was maybe meant as a substitute for those unable to master the art of baking their own pies.

Well, Pepsi's turning once more to social media to promote their latest flavor drop. Remember those early 00s social media challenges where people used to promise to name their baby "Batman" or something equally goofy if their post got enough likes? (No? Little Batman Jones is still in therapy over this!) Twitter obviously does, since they resorted to a similar strategy for hyping their latest soda flavor, promising to release it if and when their tweet announcing it got 2,021 retweets.

The newest Pepsi flavor is meant to evoke everybody's (well, over 40 percent of people's) favorite wintertime beverage, hot chocolate. Sounds a bit weird? Not really — if you've ever had a soda fountain black cow, you already know that cola and chocolate play nicely together, and marshmallow flavor only adds more sugar.

If you're anxious to try Pepsi Cocoa Cola, though, it seems like there's a bit of bad news if you read between the lines. In Pepsi's original tweet, all they promised was that they were going to "make a batch" once they received sufficient attention for their marketing ploy, and the question they asked, "Want to try and get your hands on it?" implies that there might again be a contest or other super-limited release involved. It also seems as though, seasonally appropriate or not, this drink definitely won't arrive in time for the winter holidays, since a follow-up comment from Pepsi noted, "Stay tuned for details coming in 2021!" 

Exactly when in 2021, they didn't say, although it's to be hoped that the product would arrive sometime in winter. As to whether you'll actually be able to get your mittens on the stuff, well, we'd like to point out that in response to a Twitter user asking "So everyone who retweeted gets a can of this, right?" Pepsi replied ... not one word. As the Magic 8-Ball would say: "Outlook not so good."