Skittles Drink Rumor

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About

Skittles Drink Rumor refers to unsubstantiated news that the candy brand Skittles is launching four flavors of non-carbonated beverages in 2024. Skittles has never announced the creation of such a beverage. The rumor began circulating in late 2023 before going viral in March of 2024 after Dexerto reported the rumor as confirmed fact, leading people to joke about the potentially disastrous effect the drink could have on one's health. Notably, the widespread advertisement, which may or may not be genuine, says the drinks will contain "1% juice."

Origin

The earliest known report on Skittles creating a new beverage in four Skittles flavors was posted on December 4th, 2023 to Instagram by multiple accounts, including @snackolator^[6] and @sodaseekers,^[1] (shown below) as well as the LinkedIn^[9] account Emerging Brands Management. The @sodaseekers post gained over 1,800 likes in three months.

Of note, Skittles has dabbled with drink creation and collaboration in the past. They have created powdered drink packets^[4] and collaborated with the energy drink brand C4.^[5]

Spread

Over the following few days, some other food-themed Instagram accounts and blogs, including Sporked^[2] and @snackgator,^[3] posted about the beverages, though neither mentioned that Skittles itself had never announced their creation.

On March 4th, 2024, the Twitter account @BevDistCle^[7] posted another graphic that seemed to announce Skittles was making beverages, gaining over 930 retweets and 1,200 likes in one day (shown below, left). The following day, Dexerto^[8] reposted the same graphic on Twitter. That post was amended with a community note clarifying that Skittles had never announced a line of beverages (shown below, right). .

In response to both tweets, Twitter users made jokes about the possible detrimental health effects the Skittles drink could have. For example, on March 4th, Twitter user @vivadrevo posted a clip from SpongeBob SquarePants to joke about the detrimental effects the drink could have, gaining over 4,900 retweets and 38,000 likes in one day.