Care for a dirty soda? How this drink trend became a US obsession

xwhatsapp-strokecopylinkgoogleAdd Al Jazeera on GoogleinfoNew York’s soda fountains once competed fiercely for customers, tempting them with increasingly unusual drink concoctions. In the late 19th century, soda jerks served up drinks like Kola Phosphates, Fuzzy Flips and Lime Rickeys while the Lower East Side’s Louis Auster created the egg cream, a simple mix of chocolate syrup, seltzer and milk that became an icon of the city’s soda culture.

More than a century later, that old impulse has found a new life. Dirty soda - fountain soda mixed with syrups, cream, fruit purees and citrus - has grown from a regional curiosity in the United States into a national trend, powered by customisation, social media and a generation of consumers looking for a cheap social treat and places to meet friends.

In 2009, a woman named Nicole Tanner in St George in the western state of Utah had the idea to open a fountain drink business. She needed a way to provide for her five children after she and her husband relocated to Utah from Colorado. Families recovering from the Great Recession were cutting back on dinners out and vacations, but Tanner thought a special trip to get their favourite drink might offer an affordable indulgence.

This occurred to her because her family was already going to Sonic drive-ins to get their drinks of choice. Tanner would get a Diet Coke with lime, but she didn’t like how long she had to wait in the drive-through and started to dream of a different business model.

“I knew there had to be a better way to get our drink fix with friendly customer service and an exceptional product. So why not create a drive-through drink business that had all of that?” Tanner wrote in 2022.

Soon, Tanner knew she wanted to do for fountain drinks what Starbucks had done for coffee, creating a true destination with endlessly customisable combinations. The result was Swig, which opened its first location in St George in 2010. For the first couple of months, drinks were priced at just $1 to build up a customer base. By the end of the first year, lines were wrapped around the corner.

Not long after Swig opened, Tanner and her team coined the term “dirty soda” when they added a Dirty Dr Pepper - the carbonated beverage plus coconut syrup - to their menu.

Swig became especially popular with Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who make up about half of Utah’s population. Many church members abstain from alcohol as well as coffee and tea under the church’s Word of Wisdom, which prohibits “hot drinks”. Although some members treated other caffeinated drinks as off-limits, the church clarified in 2012 that caffeine itself is not prohibited. That helped make customisable fountain drinks a more socially accepted indulgence in Utah.

The dirty soda concept spread quickly. Afternoon soda runs became a staple for students after school, parents picking up kids from activities and groups of friends meeting for an evening treat. Swig strategically opened locations near universities like Utah Tech University and Brigham Young University, cultivating a loyal student fan base.

Within a few years, Utah saw the rise of other specialty soda chains. Sodalicious was one of Swig’s earliest competitors and helped normalise the concept of standalone soda shops. Quench It! helped spread the model beyond Utah. FiiZ Drinks also started in the Beehive State and then expanded to more than 70 locations nationwide.

In 2013 with the market becoming more crowded, Tanner and Swig filed for a Utah and federal trademark for the term “dirty soda”. Competition became heated enough that in 2017, Swig and Sodalicious were involved in a high-profile legal dispute over branding and recipes, which concluded with an undisclosed settlement.

By the end of the 2010s, dirty soda had become one of Utah’s most recognisable homegrown businesses while most of the US had still barely heard of it. That changed in the early 2020s when it broke into the mainstream, thanks to social media.

“Dirty soda’s shift from Utah to the national stage really came down to perfect timing,” said Tara Lewis, Yelp’s trend expert. “It hit just as interest in nonalcoholic alternatives was surging, and its endless customisability made it shareable on social media.”

Meanwhile, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a reality show on the streaming service Hulu, featured soda runs as part of everyday life. After the show premiered in 2024, Yelp searches for dirty soda increased by more than 600 percent year over year, hitting an all-time high in May this year, up 229 percent compared with May 2025.

But this explains only how Americans discovered dirty soda - not why they embraced it.

The rise of dirty soda has aligned with broader shifts among younger adults. Surveys have found that many Gen Z consumers are drinking less alcohol than previous generations while showing greater interest in mocktails and other nonalcoholic beverages. Rather than meeting at bars or restaurants, soda shops offer inexpensive “third spaces” for socialising.

Gen Z - and increasingly, as it acquires its own spending power, Gen Alpha - is also more mindful than previous generations about supporting small businesses. A recent survey by Constant Contact suggested that about 50 percent of members of Gen Z intentionally seek out small businesses during the week, compared with 25 percent of baby boomers.

“I definitely prefer going to my local shop over fast food,” Los Angeles teen Leyla C, 17, said. “I think small businesses are always a little more personable and have better food and drinks.”

From about 1900 to 1955, the soda fountain was a social hub for Americans, said Ben Tannenbaum, author of Proof Points, a newsletter on consumer behaviour and food and beverage culture. He pointed to Prohibition, the era when alcoholic beverages were banned in the US from 1920 to 1933, as the biggest accelerant. When the bars closed, soda fountains filled the social void. The 1946 Frank Capra movie classic It’s a Wonderful Life illustrates the important role Mr Gower’s drugstore soda fountain played in George Bailey’s childhood.

But when the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in December 1933, repealing the 18th Amendment and the nationwide ban on the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol, soda fountains faced an existential threat. Now that people could gather at bars - with no national drinking age limits, to boot - soda fountains saw a decline in foot traffic.

People also no longer needed to visit soda fountains to get a glass of ice-cold Coke. After Coca-Cola was first served at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta in 1886, it remained a soda fountain drink until bottling rights were sold in 1899. By 1909, nearly 400 bottling plants had opened across the US.

“Bottled Coke didn’t replace the soda fountain’s product,” Tannenbaum said. “It replaced the soda fountain’s reason to exist.”

But culture, by its nature, is dynamic, and what Nicole Tanner recognised in the 2010s when she founded Swig was that a soda shop could once again be a destination, as much about the trip as it was about the product sold.

“I knew Swig would be much more than just a drink,” Tanner wrote in 2022. “It would be a destination and the best part of people’s day.”

Tanner was right. Soda shops have become a hub of social life for young people. Gabriella Ludwig, an 18-year-old from Fairfax County, Virginia, outside Washington, DC, loves going to her local soda shop, Coco’s Sodas + Sweets, with friends.

“It’s just something different than the norm. A lot of times it just feels like there’s nothing to do or it’s just the same thing over and over again - restaurants, shopping and movies or whatever,” she said.

“But this offers something new where we don’t have to spend much but can sit down, chat and enjoy a fun drink. It’s also fun because we can’t drink alcohol yet, so it gives us more options than just the regular sodas and whatnot.”

For decades, classic teenage hangouts like shopping malls, arcades and skating rinks have been in decline, leaving few places where teenagers could meet with friends without having to spend a lot of money or be ushered away for loitering.

According to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), compiled by the US government's Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans aged 15 and older in 2005 were spending 273.75 hours socialising and 51.1 hours on computer use for leisure annually. In 2010 when the first Swig opened, that same age group reported 255.5 hours socialising and 73 hours on the computer weekly. By 2022, when soda shop expansion accelerated, the ATUS showed more significant social decline: 204.4 hours socialising to 73 hours on the computer. Today, this trend shows no signs of reversing.

Given that computer use remained the same from 2010 to 2022, perhaps teens aren’t spending less time together because they're online. Perhaps they simply have nowhere to go. A 2025 study in the Health & Place journal found the availability of “third places”, social environments separate from the home and workplace, fell across all US census tracts from 2010 to 2021.

“The teenagers I work with seldom say to me they would prefer to be on their phones,” registered psychologist Rod Mitchell said. “What they say is that there are no places to go and that asking anyone to hang out seems like a lot these days. That’s what a third place solves: It removes the ask.”

The boom in standalone soda shops suggests that if you build it, they will come (and document it for social media). Some of the larger chains now operate well beyond Utah. With more than 160 locations, Swig has expanded into 16 states, but its footprint is concentrated in Utah, Texas and Arizona. FiiZ Drinks now has more than 70 locations nationwide although it is also most concentrated in the US mountain states.

Meanwhile, independent soda concepts have opened in states including Arizona, the Carolinas, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia, showing that the trend has spread well beyond Utah. It has even expanded internationally with shops popping up throughout Canada and Australia.

Johnny’s Dirty Soda in Chicago is a local, family-owned business with a mobile cart that can be rented for events and pop-ups. Their most popular offering is the My Liege (Dr Pepper, cherry and vanilla syrups and cold foam), but regulars have also developed their own go-to concoctions. Imported exotic snacks that co-owners Syed Ahmed and Omar Ewaida stock to supplement their soda offerings line the shop’s shelves.

“I was excited that Johnny’s started in Chicago because I had been wanting to try a real dirty soda after seeing the trend on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” said Caroline Prewitt, a student at Northwestern University. However, to actually supplant drinking culture, Prewitt noted, soda shops would have to be open later. (Johnny’s closes at 7pm on weekends.)

A traditional retail lease is not a barrier to entry for dirty soda entrepreneurs. Dirty soda trucks are gaining momentum, allowing operators to launch their businesses with less upfront investment and, as an added benefit, to meet their customers where they are.

Because soda shops sell inexpensive, customisable drinks, they can encourage frequent visits and function more like beverage destinations than traditional fast-food restaurants while benefitting from the higher margins typical of fountain beverages.

However, major brands are also trying to capitalise on the trend, encroaching on standalone soda shops’ consumer base. Beverage companies, including PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Keurig Dr Pepper and Nestle, have introduced ready-to-drink items, such as cream-flavoured colas and mixers like creamers and flavoured syrups.

The soda shop’s biggest competitors, namely fast-food joints or quick-service restaurants (QSRs), have also entered the space, offering flavoured cream add-ins, build-your-own beverages and dirty versions of flagship sodas. For decades, US foodservice brands sold beverages as attachments to food, explained Eric Lam, CEO of Berry AI, which provides AI-powered service insights to brands such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King. Increasingly, that relationship has reversed. Will the one-stop-shop nature of QSRs squeeze soda shops out entirely?

Not so fast. The high-customisation nature of dirty soda puts real pressure on QSRs, Lam said. “If dirty soda adds 30 seconds to every ticket, you’ve just made your busiest part of the day slower without knowing why,” Lam said.

Meanwhile, that customisability is exactly what gives standalone soda shops a foothold in the market that ready-to-drink (RTD) sales can’t compete with, Tannenbaum said.

Soda shops may not be doomed to suffer the same fate as the once-ubiquitous US soda fountains. This time, it’s not about simply being able to bypass the soda fountain by purchasing bottled Coke to stock the fridge at home. It’s about the experience of choosing toppings and add-ins to “dirty up” Cokes.

“Customisation creates ownership, and ownership creates habit,” Tannenbaum said. “People value the drink more because they built it. This makes the category sticky, and it’s the one thing a prepackaged RTD almost certainly can’t replicate.”

With hundreds of possible combinations, dirty soda encourages experimentation (and thus repeat sales) until consumers find their perfect drinks. As of 2025, the market had grown to an estimated $1.1bn industry and is expected to swell to $2.6bn by 2033, according to an HTF Market Intelligence report.

At its core, “dirty soda isn’t really about soda,” said Graham Humphreys, president of The Culinary Edge, a food and beverage consulting company. “It’s about personalisation, indulgence and identity. Consumers are purchasing a beverage, and more than that, they’re buying a small moment of reward.”

To be sure, soda shops have some limitations that may confine them to a niche category rather than a staple that exists on every corner alongside Starbucks. First, there are health concerns over calories and sugar. The average dirty soda has 250 to 400 calories, and a fully loaded large one can pack 500 calories or more. Also, many of the shops don’t serve food, so there is less appeal for consumers who want a meal and a beverage. Some shops have hedged their bets by branding themselves as soda shops that also carry sweets and snacks, such as cookies, cakes and pretzels.

But even with the challenges, Lam said he thinks everyone can capture a piece of the dirty soda pie. He said soda shops and QSRs can coexist so long as the latter carefully plan for the kind of demand and limited customisation their format can handle.

“If you can see the additional pressure, you can adjust for it, and then it’s a revenue opportunity instead of a bottleneck,” Lam said.

Dirty soda has evolved from a regional curiosity into a new beverage category. Whether standalone soda shops become as ubiquitous as coffee shops remains uncertain, but they have already influenced the broader restaurant industry, and they are expanding across the US.

“Ultimately, dirty soda’s future will be determined by whether specialist brands can continue owning occasions that consumers value enough to justify a dedicated trip,” Humphreys said.