Coca Cola Spiced

Posted on Mar 21, 2024

Hey, we’re back! With a food review! It’s just like old times, isn’t it? Something FINALLY interesting enough to review has dropped in the soda aisles recently: New Coca-Cola Spiced!

This is a “permanent” addition to the Coca-Cola flavor lineup, which means you’ve got about two years to enjoy this before you can only find it in THAT grocery store way too far away from where you live and they don’t always have it anyway. Coca-Cola Spiced is a really weird and new kind of flavor to add to your permanent lineup, though! Sodas described as “spiced” only really come out around the Christmas season and only as LTOs! Coke describes the flavor as a “unique alchemy of our iconic cola, raspberry and spiced flavors”, which to us is surprisingly non-evocative. Is it just raspberry Coke, then? Which spices were used? And how about some herbs?

Coca Cola Spiced promotional material. It basically looks like Coke but purple

Here’s a chance to mention: the packaging is remarkably non-evocative, even for Coke flavors. Seriously, this just looks like regular Coke. It at least has some purple on it, but it makes you wonder the fate of the moron in a hurry who also happens to really hate raspberry, like, some sort of day-ruining hatred of raspberry.

Um, anyway. As for the initial sniff?

palabomeno: It's raspberry.

starsystemerror: Smells Weird.

brilokuloj: Huh.

Glowing reviews all around. So, how does it taste?

A photo of the bottle.

It's hysterical how much this picture sucks, but we had to take it at the last minute

Well… It’s…

It’s not even that spiced. When we sipped this we were expecing the big, bold cinnamon flavors of Christmastime sodas like the legendary Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry, but this was barely spicy at all. It did have a hint of cinnamon, but the overwhelming note was pure raspberry.

Raspberry Coke is fine, it’s good even, but this feels kind of like a Dr. Pepper ripoff with a weird aftertaste. Fake berry flavors always taste like cough syrup too, so it brings back bad high school memories of chugging Vicks 44 and chasing it with Coke to get high. As a New Permanent Coca-Cola, this sits pretty firmly between “underwhelming” and “pretty good.” If this was just Raspberry Coca-Cola we would probably love this! But it’s not Raspberry Coke, it’s Coca-Cola Spiced.

What’s the point of something like this, anyway? Coke’s been cranking out limited time flavor after limited time flavor, so we don’t know why this was chosen to become permanent. We didn’t even get a trial period before it was added the permanent roster, they just popped it out fully formed and expected us to love it, like a new cousin. Who knows why Coke is on such a flavors kick right now?

Coca-Cola Spiced doesn’t deliver what it says it does, but it is still a tasty new soda for pop fans to enjoy. It’s… perfectly fine. If you like raspberry, you will like this Coke. If you do not you probably will not like it. What else is there to say? It’s Coke! You know what Coke tastes like! Imagine that but with raspberry! Come on, can’t we get something actually spiced? Do better, Coke. Do better.

brilokuloj: Well, I liked it.

Categories: food

Tagged: soda raspberry

On this day...