The 5 Legendary Snapples
Posted on Jun 4, 2024
In a world of disarray, where the winters are burning hot and the summers have turned cold, Keurig Dr Pepper dares to make a statement. The company is reintroducing Snapple Elements, their 1999 series of environmentalist-themed “fruit drinks”, just in time for the end of the world.
Will a crisp, cool beverage be enough to distract us from global warming? Probably not! But let’s at least figure out if they’re good drinks.
We have already had the Snapple Elements many times by the time of me writing this article. This is on account of their presence in the coolers at Woodman’s, a terrifyingly large grocery store which also unfortunately boasts some of the best prices in our area. Once you’ve spent an hour running around a just-too-bright tiled labyrinth just trying to remember where the hell the instant ramen is, a $1 cold drink is a welcome reward for the drive home.
With that in mind, this is not a blind taste test, but we did our best to actually savor the drinks this time instead of mindlessly chugging them like Gatorades.
Here they all are, listed in a Captain Planet-approved order:
Earth
According to the label, this is a cherry & fig-flavored black tea drink.
brilokuloj: Oh God.
starsystemerror: This is just fruit-flavored black tea.
palabomeno: I think it’s pretty good. It’s kind of boring, but it’s a good boring.
There’s definitely something earthy about it. Ugh. This might have been the lowest on our list.
Looking at the ingredients for these is really funny. This one has no fruit juice listed, only ‘natural flavors’ at the very end. This is a watered down tea drink that may have been in the general vicinity of some fruit. It’s also kind of gross if you don’t like red flavors. This is a pass.
Fire
Fire is a dragon fruit-flavored juice drink, probably chosen solely for the word ‘dragon’.
brilokuloj: Hey, that’s pretty good!
starsystemerror: This one is still just… fruit drink. I’ve never had dragon fruit, so I don’t know. It tastes like fruit Icebreakers.
palabomeno: It’s mostly grape juice flavor, but at least it actually tastes like something.
Indeed, this is actually a pear and grape juice drink, just like any other Juicy Juice you can get at the store. Hopefully the dragon fruit is in the ‘natural flavors’, because otherwise this drink is just full of hot air.
Speaking of…
Air
Air claims to be a prickly pear and peach-flavored white tea.
brilokuloj: It’s like an Arizona peach tea, only waterier and kind of sucks. This one is my favorite!
starsystemerror: Yeah, just tastes like peach tea.
palabomeno: This is nothing. This is the La Croix of noncarbonated juice beverages.
Altogether, it’s inoffensively bland. This might be a bit more exciting if they served it in a big bottle, but then it’d be like $3 minimum, and that’s insane for something you could get by mixing water and juice.
Perplexingly enough, the flavor in this one actually comes from acerola fruit, a cherry-like berry that is neither prickly pear nor peach.
Rain
Finally answering Neil Cicierega’s decades-old question of whether or not you should drink rain water: it’s fine, because rain is an agave cactus-flavored juice drink.
palabomeno: It’s amazing how much agave tastes like pears. But then again, the third ingredient is pear juice concentrate.
brilokuloj: How does this one always taste like a public pool?
starsystemerror: I don’t know how Rain tastes. I don’t know.
Hold your mouth below a drain on a rainy day, it tastes like pear water.
This one is Paula’s favorite, and because life isn’t fair, it’s frequently the only one sold out at the coolers. Paula has a fondness for agave; her favorite energy drink is Blue Agave Full Throttle, so much so that we once purchased blue agave syrup from Trader Joe’s and learned that the energy drink doesn’t really taste like its namesake. She still likes it, though.
Sun
If the Sun itself had a flavor, apparently it would be starfruit, orange, and nectarine. That’s a lot of flavors! Will it actually feature any of those?
starsystemerror: Wow, I really like that. This is the only one that is actually light and refreshing. It tastes like eating a nectarine with the skin on.
brilokuloj: Yeah, this is pretty good, actually!
palabomeno: It really… doesn’t… much of anything. It mostly tastes like watered down orange juice. I would rather drink Tampico than this.
This one has pear, orange, and acerola fruit extract. If we accept acerola as a stand-in for stone fruit flavor, this is actually the first drink to be exactly what it claims to be… but perplexingly enough, it also features carrot juice. Certainly not an issue by any means as it doesn’t detract from the flavor, but it’s a little sad that even with their healthy-focused marketing they couldn’t list carrots on the front of the label.
And there you have it, that’s all 5 flavors. As a dollar drink fresh from those nice grocery store coolers that always run a little colder than your own fridge, they’re great, but it’s really not worth buying a premium for a pack of them. This is something you buy to wash down a mediocre sandwich because you got Subway coupons in the mail this month and you forgot to bring water with you while going out to get groceries.
Except … wait, what happened to Moon? Or Lightning? Or Diet Air?
That’s right. This article is a two-parter, and a crossover with our Wayback series. Stay tuned.
If you give us $5 a month on Patreon, that’s enough to get each Snapple Elements flavor!
Tagged: 1999 2022 drinks keurig dr pepper retro snapple
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