Three years into Starry — the lemon-lime entrant PepsiCo launched in January 2023 to replace Sierra Mist — the answer to the bigger question is becoming clear: this isn't a story about a new soda. It's a story about why PepsiCo was willing to retire a brand it had spent twenty-three years trying to save, and why that willingness is one of the rarest disciplines in consumer packaged goods.
The setup
Sierra Mist launched in 2000 and never crossed roughly 0.1% of the U.S. soda market against Sprite's ~7% category lead. PepsiCo retired it in 2023 and replaced it with Starry. Most companies would have kept iterating. PepsiCo's willingness to kill the laggard is the entire reason the replacement had a chance.
The 23 years of trying to fix Sierra Mist
Sierra Mist's history is a master class in how consumer brands die slowly. The brand launched in 2000 as PepsiCo's answer to Coca-Cola's Sprite, which had dominated the lemon-lime category since the 1960s. From the start, the brand had a positioning problem. Sprite owned the lemon-lime occasion in consumer minds. Sierra Mist offered no meaningful reason to switch.
So PepsiCo iterated. The brand was reformulated multiple times — sweetener changes, caffeine adjustments, all-natural relaunches. In 2010, the formula shifted to all-natural ingredients. In 2013, the brand was renamed Mist Twist in a positioning attempt that lasted less than three years before reverting to Sierra Mist. In 2016, the formula changed again. Each iteration was framed as a fresh start. None of them addressed the underlying problem: Sierra Mist was never something Gen X or Millennial consumers asked for. It was something they were offered when Sprite wasn't available.
By the late 2010s, the brand held under one-tenth of one percent of the U.S. carbonated soft drink market. Sprite held roughly seven percent. The gap was structural, not marketing-driven. No reformulation, renaming, or relaunch was going to close it. PepsiCo's leadership eventually came to the same conclusion: the brand was unsalvageable, and the shelf space, marketing budget, and brand attention were better spent on something built from scratch.
"Sierra Mist failed because it was the answer to a question consumers were not asking. Starry started by asking the question first."
What PepsiCo got right with Starry
Starry was designed differently from the first day. The name is cleaner, simpler, and easier to remember than Sierra Mist or Mist Twist. The packaging skews to brighter, more saturated palettes than the peer set. The rollout strategy bypassed the legacy launch playbook entirely.
Four decisions stand out:
- Cohort intent before flavor R&D. Most failed beverage launches overweight taste and formulation. Starry started from a different question: what does Gen Z want a beverage to signal? The product was built backward from that signal.
- Creator-first launch. Starry sampled at the National Association of Convenience Stores in Las Vegas in October 2022, distributed influencer kits, and built early reviews and social content before the SKU was nationally available. By the time it hit Walmart and Kroger shelves, the audience had already seen it.
- Convenience channel priority. Starry was placed for the channel where its target consumer actually buys beverages — 7-Eleven, Wawa, Sheetz — not the grocery middle aisle where Sierra Mist had quietly died.
- Sustainability as table stakes. The brand committed to doubling the percentage of PepsiCo beverages delivered in reusable bottles by 2030 — framed as a Gen Z expectation rather than a marketing claim.
None of these decisions are unique on their own. Many brands have done one or two of them. What is distinctive is that PepsiCo did all four for a single launch, and was willing to retire the predecessor brand to give the new entrant clean shelf space and budget cover.
The Gen Z playbook in detail
Starry is the clearest current expression of PepsiCo's broader Gen Z bet. The pattern across the portfolio — Mountain Dew's gaming partnerships, Gatorade's athlete-cohort dominance, Pepsi-Cola's music and culture programming with Bad Bunny and Doja Cat — runs on the same principle: start with who you want to win, then build the product or campaign to fit.
Gen Z buyers reward this approach because they recognize when they are being targeted versus when a legacy brand is trying to retrofit itself. The five-second TV ad with a Gen Z–coded soundtrack reads as inauthentic. The convenience-channel sampling program followed by a creator kit reads as native. The difference is small in execution and enormous in reception.
Where Starry still hasn't won
Three years in, Starry has earned visibility, shelf placement, and a real share of voice in the lemon-lime conversation. It has not yet displaced Sprite as the category default. Sprite remains the dominant answer for most lemon-lime occasions — the bar mixer, the drink in the kid's lunch, the soda by the pool. Starry is the alternative.
That gap closes through sustained brand investment, not another product change. Sprite has decades of cultural anchoring through hip-hop sponsorships, NBA partnerships, and consistent marketing presence. Starry will need the same patience to convert visibility into category leadership. The launch was the easy part. The next five years of follow-through are harder.
What it means for the broader portfolio
The Sierra Mist–to–Starry transition is a template, not a one-off. PepsiCo has used the same model with other brands — kill the underperformer, learn what failed, launch the replacement built for the next cohort rather than the last one. Pepsi Blue replaced nothing and was replaced by nothing. Crystal Pepsi was killed, revived, killed again. Pepsi True came and went. The portfolio's hit rate is not high, but the discipline of retiring failures keeps the company free to launch the next experiment.
The lesson generalizes far beyond beverages. Consumer companies in every category accumulate brands that should have been killed two years ago — kept alive out of organizational inertia, sunk-cost loyalty, or simple aversion to public retirement. PepsiCo's edge is that it retires aggressively, which means it can also launch aggressively. The two disciplines are the same discipline.
Related coverage from Everything-PR:
Pepsi's Reinvention Machine: Four Decades of Built-In Adaptation · PepsiMoji Was a Decade Ahead: Pepsi's Bet on Symbol Communication · Pepsi's Deep Bench: Why Internal Succession Is a Strategy · PepsiCo's Partnership Strategy
