Pickle Juice Soda? Offbeat Flavor Sees Surge In Popularity
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- A new food craze is popping up along the East Coast -- people are buying and enjoying pickle juice soda. The drink is made with pickle juice and pure cane sugar.
If you're making a face, you may want to think again. The green bottles are flying off the shelves after a candy shop in Pennsylvania posted the beverage to social media this weekend.
But you don't have order the popular concoction online to try it -- in Spring Lake Park, they've been selling the soda for weeks.
Our search to get our hands on the much-talked-about Pickle Juice Soda ended at Blue Sun Soda Shop, where you can't help but smile walking in.
"No one walks through this door in a bad mood," store owner Mark Lazarchic said. "You're walking through the door and you're buying sugar, and you're coming in and you're going to play pinball, and you're going to eat some popcorn and buy soda. Everyone is happy that comes into this door."
Owner Mark Lazarchic opened the shop because he loves soda, and also loves making it. That's why they have their own line, Whistler, which they create and bottle on site. In all, you can find more than 1,300 flavors at Blue Sun.
"You can get fru-fru berry soda, you can get prickly pear soda -- if there's a flavor you like, there's a soda that it's being done in,"
He's not joking when he says any flavor -- from butter soda, to bacon and of course Minnesota's beloved sweet corn.
So what does Lazarchic think about the pickle juice soda hype?
"They're either, 'Oh, this is great, they finally made pickle juice into a soda!' or they're like me, thinking this is disgusting and I would never drink this," he said. "But you sell it. Of course I sell it -- I sell cotton candy soda. I'm never going to drink it, but I sell cotton candy soda."