How Sierra Mist Evolved Into Starry
Some failed products go down in flames, but Sierra Mist went quietly. In January 2023, PepsiCo announced that the lemon-lime soda would be discontinued and replaced by Starry. At first, there didn't appear to be much of a difference between the two — they're the same flavor and contain basically the same ingredients — but Starry immediately sought to differentiate itself with a marketing campaign centered on Gen Z.
In a press release, PepsiCo described Starry as a "soda for a generation of irreverent optimists," and the brand calls Starry "the next choice of the new generation" on the PepsiCo website. The latter references Pepsi's prior "The Choice of a New Generation" slogan, and it follows what has been a constant theme for the company. Pepsi seems obsessed with defining a generation through its products. The brand has previously introduced slogans like "Pepsi ... for those who think young," and "You're in the Pepsi generation." With Starry, this ideology has been taken even further.
PepsiCo has targeted every marketing move for Starry towards Gen Z. The soda's slogan, "Hits Different," is mostly advertised on TikTok. At Super Bowl LVIII, Starry took it up another notch with a commercial featuring Gen Z icon Ice Spice, which was easily one of the best Super Bowl food commercials of 2024. Starry is definitely getting a push beyond anything Sierra Mist ever had, but the two drinks aren't that different. What's more, we've seen this exact same scenario play out before ... multiple times.
Sierra Mist and Starry are part of a long lineage
Sierra Mist always felt like the odd one out in the soda game. Its name felt like a blatant spin on Mountain Dew, but its flavor was clearly designed to compete with Sprite. After watching sales plummet for years, it's no surprise that PepsiCo ditched Sierra Mist, and Starry earned more in its first year than the former did over the past four combined (according to Axios). But before puting too much stake in Starry's success, you should know that Sierra Mist was once in the same spot.
Sierra Mist wasn't PepsiCo's first lemon-lime soda. The brand previously attempted to win customers in the 1960s with Teem. It was discontinued in the '80s and replaced by Slice, which offered lemon-lime along with other flavors. Slice was short-lived, and in the late '90s, PepsiCo tried launching a caffeinated lemon-lime soda called Storm, which never got past the testing phase. Sierra Mist was born in 1999, using the Storm formula minus the caffeine, but it was never a huge seller. In 2015, PepsiCo rebranded Sierra Mist as Mist Twist before reverting to the original name, then abandoning it altogether to make a fresh attempt with Starry.
From Teem to Starry, each soft drink has been trying to do the same thing: triumph over Sprite, which dominates the lemon-lime soda market. PepsiCo keeps changing things up with its lemon-lime brands, but beyond the packaging and marketing, are any of them really that unique?
Is Starry really that different from Sierra Mist?
Starry's marketing is all about being different. The Super Bowl LVIII commercial featuring Ice Spice ran with the tagline "It's time to see other sodas." Does Starry succeed in setting itself apart? Well, the public opinion is split, with some reviews praising it as a truly unique offering in the lemon-lime genre, while others taste little to no difference between Starry and Sierra Mist.
In side-by-side taste tests conducted by Allrecipes and The Spokesman-Review, Starry was favored over Sierra Mist for having a more citrusy flavor and less of a cloying sweetness to it. However, in an identical test conducted by Delish, tasters perceived very little to distinguish Starry from Sierra Mist, saying they "had to go back for several sips to identify the differences." Their team could not reach a consensus as to which soda was better, though they did agree that Starry seemed less sweet.
Both beverages share almost the exact same ingredients, with one controversial difference. Sierra Mist was made with cane sugar while Starry currently follows the lead of Sprite (and other sodas) by using high-fructose corn syrup. Corn syrup has a more neutral flavor than cane sugar, which might explain why taste tests found Starry to be less sweet. However, Starry actually contains more grams of sugar per serving than Sierra Mist. The other key difference is that Starry has slightly more citric acid in it, going for a stronger citrus punch than its predecessor.