What's Actually In Your Dirty Soda? (I Read the Label So You Don't Have To)

A NOTE FROM CHEF NETTIE — BEVERAGE INNOVATION

I live in Utah, which means I watched the dirty soda trend explode from a front-row seat. What started as a local, slightly quirky habit — Diet Coke with coconut cream and a splash of lime — has turned into a full national category, and it's still growing fast. But almost every dirty soda on the market today is built the exact same way: soda plus flavored syrup or a flavored creamer. Nobody's asking what's actually in that syrup, and I think that's about to change.

What CITREVE Is, and Why I Built It This Way

I'm Chef Nettie Frank, and I spent close to twenty years as a professional chef before I ever started this company. My whole reason for founding CITREVE was frustration with a false choice the food industry keeps offering people: convenient and shelf-stable, or actually good. I don't think you should have to pick. That's why everything CITREVE makes is freeze-dried instead of dehydrated or syrup-based — freeze-drying is the only shelf-stable format I've found that keeps the actual fruit, not just something engineered to taste like it. It costs more to produce and it's more technically demanding, and I still think it's worth it, because I only want my name on products I'd actually be proud to serve.

Chef Nettie Frank - Chef/Founder/CEO of CITREVE

What's Really in a Bottle of Dirty Soda Syrup

Pull the ingredient label on almost any dirty soda syrup and you'll find some combination of sugar, water, citric acid, sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate (preservatives), caramel color or artificial dye, and “natural and artificial flavors.” Notice what's missing: fruit. These syrups are built to taste like fruit, and a lot of them do a genuinely impressive job of it chemically. But that's flavor engineering, not food — and as customers pay closer attention to ingredient labels across every category of food and drink, I think that distinction is about to matter a lot more in this one too.

I don't think that makes syrup companies villains — flavored syrup solved a real problem, which is that you can't put fresh dragon fruit in a bottle with a two-year shelf life. But freeze-dried fruit solves the exact same shelf-life problem without giving up the “real food” half of the equation, and I genuinely believe that's the next place this category goes.

Sour Dragon Lemonade "dirty soda" made with CITREVE Freeze-Dried Fruit Pieces

Flavored Syrup or Creamer vs Freeze-Dried Fruit Pieces

Why Now, and Why This Isn't Just a Trend Cycle

Dirty soda menu adoption is growing sharply, and the flavors driving that growth — dragon fruit, guava, lychee — are exactly the tropical, hard-to-fake flavors that syrup struggles to deliver authentically. The audience driving this category, Gen Z and younger millennials, is the same generation scrutinizing ingredient labels everywhere else in their lives, from skincare to snack food. And visually, a drink with real fruit pieces floating in it photographs completely differently than another glass of pink syrup soda — which matters enormously in a category that largely grew up on social media in the first place.

I didn't grow up thinking I'd end up making freeze-dried fruit for soda shops, but I also didn't grow up thinking dirty soda would become a category this size either. If you run a soda shop and you're curious what real fruit pieces actually do to a drink — not just the flavor, but the way it looks in the cup — I'd love to send you something to try.