Coca-Cola has a little surprise for '90s nostalgics: Surge soda, the company's equivalent to Mountain Dew, is back.
The global soda giant began selling the 'fully loaded citrus soda' on Monday, more than 12 years since the brand was discontinued. The relaunch is part of a combined effort with Amazon.com, the only place where 12-packs of 16-ounce cans are being sold.
'SURGE is back!' the product landing page reads.
It's also selling like crazy. Amazon ran out of initial supplies of Surge only hours after Coca-Cola first announced the re-release Monday morning, according to the Huffington Post. Amazon managed to restock its supply of the novelty soda, but not for long- as of Tuesday afternoon, the online retailer is once again out of Surge. Customers can sign up to receive an e-mail once the soda is in stock again.
Coca-Cola debuted Surge in 1996, at a time when PepsiCo's Mountain Dew enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the U.S. market for citrus sodas. That year, Pepsi's offering accounted for more than three-quarters of all 'heavy citrus' soda sales, while Coca-Cola's, Mello Yello, struggled, according to a New York Times article from that December.
Like Mountain Dew, the new brand, known as Surge, will be a bright, greenish-yellow citrus drink that will be high in calories and caffeine, compared with other soft drinks. Coke has been slow to mount a credible challenge to Mountain Dew, which had retail sales of $3 billion last year in the $52 billion industry, placing it first among so-called heavy citrus sodas. Mello Yello, which Coke has marketed regionally since 1979, has been a distant second.
With Surge, Coca-Cola managed to bite a chunk out of Mountain Dew's dominance. Just three years later, in 1999, Mountain Dew's market share had fallen just over 66 percent. Advertisements for the new soda were nearly as excitable as the demand.
But soon the appeal of highly-caffeinated drinks waned, and schools, retailers and supermarkets stopped carrying it. In 2002, after years of falling sales, Coca-Cola pulled Surge from production.
The resurgence of Surge is owed at least in part to the soda's vocal social media fans, according to Coca-Cola. The Surge Movement, which was created for the sole purpose of bringing the citrus soda back into production, has nearly 150,000 likes on Facebook. The same community raised nearly $4,000 on Indie GoGo to buy a billboard near Coca-Cola's headquarters that read 'Dear Coke, we couldn't buy SURGE, so we bought this billboard instead.'
'Eventually, their creativity and passionate pleas caught the company's attention,' Coca-Cola said in a statement.
The return of Surge marks not only the first time Coca-Cola has reintroduced a discontinued product to the market, but also the first time Coca-Cola has sold any soda product exclusively online. If Surge continues to sell as it has over the past day, it likely won't be the last online exclusive.
'If expectations are met, this may be only the first of a variety of efforts we explore to launch niche products through e-commerce relationships,' Wendy Clark, Coca-Cola's president of sparkling and strategic marketing, said in a written statement.
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