All Poppi flavors ranked worst to best

I’m not sure where the competition is worse, the Olympics or the soft drink industry. Old school brands like Coca Cola have been crushing competition since 1886. How’s another soda supposed to compete? Despite being around for a hundred years less, Poppi manages. Here are all the flavors, ranked.

12. Watermelon

Drinking Watermelon flavored Poppi feels kinda like licking the bottom of a bag of Sour Patch kids. The ghost of better tasting flavors lingers there on the plastic, but it’s not exactly satisfying to run your tongue across. There’s a reason why classic soda brands have no truck with watermelons. The real thing is great on a summer day, but when you try to synthesize the flavor, you’re left with something akin to a Frankenstein monster of fruit.

11. Classic Cola

Stay in your lane, Poppi. There’s nothing classic about you, and that’s okay. You’re only four years old. You’re a “healthy” soda. You weren’t once made with literal cocaine like a certain soda brand from which this particular flavor takes its unfortunate inspiration. While Poppi’s fruity flavors are refreshing, the regular cola version is a far cry from the sophisticated taste of established soda brands who had a century to get the recepie right.

10. Wild Berry

Wild Berry how could you let me down like this? Your blue can promises a taste of the most glorious of all manmade flavors: blue raspberry. But alas, the promise was broken once the liquid touched my lips. Rather than a blue raspberry Jolly Rancher, Wild Berry tastes like someone whispered the word “blue raspberry” over a sugar coated plastic bag. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still drink it. But begrudgingly.

9. Lemon Lime

Pride goeth before the fall. Poppi, baby, how could you possible be so vain, so arrogant, so full of hubris to think that your Lemon Lime could compete with the ambrosian majesty of Sprite? This flavor tastes like the wax of Icarus’ wings as they melted in the cruel heat of the sun, but with a hint of lemon.

8. Orange

Poppi’s Orange flavored soda is serviceable but it would not be enough to sway connoisseurs like Keenan and Kel away from the real thing. You’re like a lip lock person who drank a bottle of Sunny D. The taste lingers, but like reading a book originally penned in another language, the result is like kissing through an orange flavored veil.

7. Grape

Now we’re getting somewhere. While you weren’t quite able to nail the complexities of earlier flavors on this list, your Grape soda is a breakthrough. If Archimedes had been bathing in your Grape flavor instead of water, he would have never leapt from the tub shouting “eureka!” while running naked through the streets of Ancient Greece. He would have laid back and drowned in the sweet depths, and it would have been worth it. Scientific discovery be damned.

6. Root Beer

After the disappointment of Poppi’s Classic Cola flavor, I had low expectations for the brand’s attempt at replicating the most superior of sodas: Root Beer. Those expectations had nowhere to go but up. As a probiotic soda, Poppi’s earthy flavors are perfectly suited for the sweet and spicy dirt taste of Root Beer. It tastes like drinking a flower, in a good way.

5. Cherry Limeaid

Poppi you’ve done something marvelous here! You’ve ventured into that undiscovered country of flavors and returned with something new! Cherry is a difficult flavor to get right. Do it wrong, and it just tastes like gross medicine, something you’d take for a cold. But the lime? The lime was a stroke of genius, an airy freshness that offsets synthetic cherry’s sick sweet hospital taste to remind one of the freshness of the real thing.

4. Doc Pop

It’s only a matter of time before you get sued for this one, Poppi. Between now and then, I’ll drink all the Doc Pop I can get my sugar sticky hands on. Despite not going to medical school, Poppi has managed to rival one of the most celebrated physicians in the soda industry: Dr. Pepper. Somehow you’ve managed to zero in on the best kept secret recipe in cola, a formula more jealously guarded than Smoug’s gold or Mr. Krab’s Krabby Patty, the knowledge that Dr. Pepper is actually banana flavored. You have tasted of that forbidden fruit, and Eve-like, you have attained soda knowledge that will lead to your undoing. Dr. Pepper company lawyers, like God watching over the Garden of Eden, aren’t gonna let this delicious sin slide.

3. Raspberry Rose

I didn’t know what Seal was talking about when he first waxed poetical about a “Kiss From A Rose” back in the 1990’s. After tasting Raspberry Rose, now I do. A rose flavored soda? Poppi, you’ve done the impossible, you’ve made cola taste romantic. Drinking Raspberry Rose feels like falling onto a bed covered in flower petals while a cool, raspberry wind wafts in from the open windows of the balcony. If I could propose to a soda can, I would.

2. Ginger Lime

When it comes to natural flavors, Poppi’s Root Beer proved that the brand excels. Ginger Lime improves upon Root Beer’s earthy sweetness with added ginger spice. A far cry from tepid Ginger Ale, Ginger Lime sparkles brighter than a transformation sequence in a shoju anime.

1. Strawberry Lemon

Poppi you let us down with Lemon Lime, and then you go and do something like this. In the words of Jim Carrey’s character from Dumb and Dumber you TOTALLY REDEEMED YOURSELF!!! Up until this moment, no soda has been able to capture the lightning in a bottle flavor that is pink lemonade. The task may seem simple, but have major cola brands ever tried? Something tells me that their laboratories are littered with Strawberry Lemonade flavored failures that never made it past the research and development phase. You have succeeded where lesser minds could not, Poppi. Your contribution to soda science will stand next to Einstein’s relativity equations and Newton’s laws for centuries to come.

(Featured Image: Poppi)