Hi hey hello. So I’ve started up a BMC for no audience to track all of the creative projects that I want to work on, but what is next? Do I start taking my art commissions seriously? Do I write a novel? If you’re guess was design a kickstarter for a soda brand, you’re somehow more on track than even I am!
When I was a young fox girl, I was raised in a small rural town by a parent that came from the Deep South. Well, as Deep South as Florida is, anyway. I am not from Florida, but some of my roots come from there, and with it, an almost genetic love for sweet tea. If you’re not familiar with sweet tea, it is a process where you take a pot of water, throw teabags in it, and boil it on the stove. After it’s sufficiently tea-i-fied, you pour the boiled water into a large plastic pitcher with wayyy too much sugar and fill the rest with cold tap water. Stir it up and throw it in the fridge and ta da! Sweet tea. This beverage was the first thing I learned how to cook and we had a pitcher made every time we ran out. Don’t get me wrong, we also had lots of soda in the house (my parents were fiends for Pepsi, btw) and juice and stuff, too, but the tea was always there. What we always loved about the sweet tea was that we could make it as sweet as we wanted to make it. When I moved out on my own I kept making it for a while, but I stopped adding as much sugar, eventually transferring to other sweeteners or to forgo sweetness altogether. Alongside this tea habit, I also drank tons of soda. At my worst I was at around three 12 packs a day. It was actually a huge problem, but that’s a whole other story.
What I truly wanted during all of my years of drinking soda; through the toothaches, cavities, acid reflux, and a Schatzki Ring diagnosis, was a way to control what I was putting in my drinks. While I was running an errand this last week, one that I have to wake up early for roughly once every other week, and I remembered an idea I had for this a long time ago; unsweetened soda.
So, the idea is that when you go to the grocery store, you can buy pre-made sweet tea and unsweetened tea. However, if you wanted to do this for soda or juice or energy drinks, you can’t. Hell, even the powdered stuff you can get online don’t offer a completely unsweetened version. Why aren’t unsweetened drinks an option for every beverage? It’s a wrong that I intend on making right.
I’m expecting a lot of different challenges when it comes to making a soft drink brand, but my goal is to start simple. I’m going to make some artwork for the 12 flavors I have, first and foremost. Once I have that done, I will be putting together a kickstarter for this project to see if there is any interest in it. I’ll work on things like how to make it taste good without sweetness, powder versus syrup, vitamins and minerals, packaging, etc. after I know how much money I have to play with it. What I know about it right now is that powder and carbonated water doesn’t really mix well together, and that sourcing caffeine is a real problem. It’s not enough to make an entire soda brand, but other people have done crazier stuff with less than that, right? Keep an eye on this space, I will be posting WiP art for the soda flavors here as I’m working on them. If you have any comments about this project (or anything else I’m doing for that matter) feel free to let me know!