In the 90s, clear meant pure, and pure meant good and healthy. Naturally, Pepsi rolled out a clear Pepsi called Crystal Pepsi. It tasted like normal Pepsi (sort of), but consumers didn’t buy it. Cola was supposed to be brown, right? Why was Crystal Pepsi clear? Nobody knows.
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There’s a lot of confusion surrounding April 23, 1985. That’s because it was a confusing day. One of the biggest companies in the world decided to change the formula of one of the most beloved products in the world. People were not happy with the change, so Coke soon changed the recipe back. Or, so they say. Some people believe the original coke was better and lost to time.
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In the 1980s, Lifesavers tried to get into the soda market. They came out with a soda that testers loved but ended up flopping on the market. Maybe it was the brand itself or maybe it was the bright liquid inside those bottles, but consumers believed the soda would be too sweet. That seems ironic in the age of triple blended caramel mocha frappucinos.
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What color is a tomato? Most Americans would say red, although technically, they can be a lot of colors, including yellow, green, and purple. In 2000, Heinz tried to use those colorful tomatoes to make their iconic ketchup. It was a bad idea. After the novelty wore off for the kids, nobody wanted it.
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What taste comes to mind when you hear the name “Colgate”? Minty-freshness, right? Not lasagna? Or veggies and rice? Okay, then you’re normal. For some reason, Colgate released a line of frozen entrees in 1982. Maybe they wanted these meals it to do the classic “create a problem only we can solve,” forcing us to buy their food, but whatever their plan, frozen entrees are never a good idea.
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Today, advocates for the planet's health beg you to steer clear of bottled water, but back in the 90s, it was the new, cool thing. Major companies were putting out their own version this classic, tasteless beverage, so naturally, Coors hopped on board. People were understandably confused by the beer’s branding left front-and-center on the packaging, and sales were not great.
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What is this supposed to be? The name sure doesn't tell us anything. It was supposed to be a type of burger that was marketed specifically for adults, but how it differed from all the other non-adult items on the menu (like a normal cheeseburger, for example) was never made clear. To make it all worse, it was more expensive than the normal burgers.
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In 1999, the world did not have enough yogurt on the market. Wait No, it definitely did. Despite this, the magazine Cosmopolitan released a line of this beloved food. It did not do well. We’re still not sure why they tried to branch into food, but one corner of the internet has the rumor that they did it because the magazine found that a lot of people have incorporated food into their sex-life. Apparently, they just wanted to help your relationship with your significant other.
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Watermelon Oreos is just weird. Watermelon is good because it’s so… watery. Oreos are great because of the chocolate and the cream and the milk… They’re just so perfect. It’s fine for them to branch out every now and then and try to replace some of those parts, but replacing all three? It’s not even the same cookie.
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Mr. President has had some weird ideas over the years — including a travel site called GoTrump.com, a Trump board game, and a self-named magazine. He seems like a bad movie franchise trying to make money by plastering a name on anything it can. Well, add his 2007 line of steaks to that list, because if there’s any one thing you want to think of when you’re out grilling, it’s your favorite businessman.
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You have to give it to Starbucks: they aren’t afraid to branch out. They try new things, and many times, that lands them on the top of the food chain. When they partner with Pepsi, however, you get a really weird coffee soda that nobody wants.
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In 2013, Burger King tried to make healthy fries. They failed. We all know fries are bad for us, but they’re so good we eat them anyway. Taking away that unhealthiness took away everything we loved in their fries. Suffice it to say the Satisfries were not very satisfrying.
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In 1990, Maxwell House tried to make coffee easier. They put pre-brewed coffee in a cardboard container. You were supposed to heat the coffee up, but you had to pour it into a mug to do that. If you stuck the carton itself in the microwave, like many people did, you’d be surprised to find out that it’s foil-lined.
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Unless you like to eat while you drink, this drink is not for you. When Orbitz was released in 1997, people were rightfully confused. This seemed like a drink made more for looks than taste, and the sales backed that up. Nobody bought it. In all fairness, maybe that was just because it looked like a lava lamp.
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Hard drugs are a major problem for the people who struggle with them. To help those people, Redux Beverages released a drink called Cocaine. It had 2.5 times the caffeine of a Red Bull. How this helped someone with their actual cocaine addiction, we don’t know. It must have landed a few people in the hospital, though.
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Pepsi Blue was Pepsi’s attempt at competing with Vanilla Coke. It didn’t matter that Britney Spears tried to promote the product – it failed. People didn’t like the sickeningly sweet berry, cotton-candy flavored soda, and it was discontinued in 2004.
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For some reason, people fixated on bacon a few years back. Bacon is delicious, but product marketing took it a little too far. There was bacon candy, bacon Chapstick, and so many other products that used fake bacon flavoring. Out of all of them, the worst was bacon soda. Not a single company managed to make a bacon drink that tasted good, and most of them quit trying.
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Eating seafood at a burger place doesn’t really sound like a great idea. It’s basically food poisoning in waiting. To make things worse, the sandwich was listed at a suspiciously low price of $7. No one was going to fall for that trick and be sick for days.
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What does Coca-Cola need? More caffeine, apparently. That was what Coca-Cola thought when Blak was introduced in the early 2000s. It was a blend of regular Coke and coffee. It only lasted 17 months before it was pulled from the shelves.
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Eating cereal with milk on the go is tough, and we can admit that. That being said, we don't need a product like this. Kelloggs released a breakfast kit that included a single serving of cereal, a spoon, and a single-serving of “shelf-stable” milk. What does “shelf-stable” mean? It was on the shelves for two years.
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There was a time in American history where Jell-O was everything, and people would put almost any food in gelatin. It was around this time that Jell-O decided to make Jell-O for salads in celery and mixed-vegetable flavoring. Perfect for your…lettuce?
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During 2002 and 2003, you could eat blue fries with blue ketchup. Ore Ida released a line of “Funky Fries” that were oddly colored and flavored. The list included Cinna-Stiks, Cocoa Crispers, Crunchy Rings, Kool Blue, and Sour Cream & “Jive.”
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The idea of a lower fat chip is a dream, but is it possible? It was with Olestra. It was fine until people started to have abdominal cramping, diarrhea, and anal leakage. You read that right. You can still find Olestra chips, but we wouldn’t suggest eating them.
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Gerber Singles was possibly one of the biggest food product fails ever made. They are baby food jars with the usual mush that was designed as a meal for one. Not babies, though – adults. This mushy food was for adults that wanted a single serving of food while they’re sitting in front of their TV. It came in flavors like Creamed Beef, Beef Burgundy, Chicken Madeira, and Blueberry Delight.
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Four Loko was incredibly popular while it lasted. There was only one major issue: it was damaging to the human body. It contained caffeine and alcohol, an upper and a downer. It kept you drunk and wired, but it also sent some teens to an early grave.
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Do you want your lettuce and tomato cool and your meat warm? The McDLT was supposed to fix an issue that honestly didn’t exist. It was a deconstructed burger sold in a Styrofoam container that you had to put together. Everyone that buys fast food wants to assemble their food, right?
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This was more of a marketing fail than a food fail. When PepsiCo released Lemonade, it decided to use the Frito Lay brand instead of the regular PepsiCo brand. It confused customers because the brand was associated with chips. How could they make a good lemonade?
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McDonald’s has had a lot of weird food ideas, but spaghetti has to be the strangest. For a little while, McDonald’s sold a McSpaghetti in a small portion of the United States. It was tested for about a year, and it unsurprisingly didn’t do well.
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Taco Bell is synonymous with low-quality food that upsets your stomach, but this menu item stands above the rest. Some brave souls decided to the seafood salad, which came with shrimp, whitefish, and snow crab. Taco Bell already has food poisoning issues – why bother testing your luck?
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Everyone can agree that making bacon kind of sucks, but that doesn’t mean we need a new-fangled product to fix it. The same people that made Reddi-Wip released Reddi-Bacon. It was bacon that you stuck in the microwave, but it didn’t quite work because it was a huge fire hazard.
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The thought of black licorice alone is enough to make people want to gag but to concoct a hot dog infused with black licorice flavor is the most vomit-inducing idea ever; not to mention that black dye that would have to be loaded into these babies. Everything about this is just WRONG.
This post originated on Instagram and started circulating in 2021, making its way to Reddit before going viral. The world was horrified but it turned out this product was fake, thankfully. But even USA Today fell for the hoax, and after reporting on it, Stephanie Peterson, a spokesperson Kraft Heinz, informed them "This is not a real product."
Rest assured, HalloWieners can't hurt you; they aren't real.
