Slice was a fruit-flavored soft drink line launched by PepsiCo in 1984, notable at the time for containing a small percentage of real fruit juice, a selling point the company used to differentiate it from purely artificial competitors. For a period in the 1980s it was a significant national brand, before shifting strategy and shelf competition pushed it aside.
A juice-added pitch
When Slice debuted, PepsiCo positioned it as a step up from ordinary soda by advertising the inclusion of real fruit juice, initially around ten percent in some varieties. In an era increasingly conscious of what went into packaged food and drink, that claim gave Slice a distinct marketing hook. The line launched with lemon-lime as a direct competitor to Sprite and 7 Up, and expanded quickly into a range of fruit flavors such as orange, apple, grape and others, aiming to be a whole family of fruit sodas rather than a single product.
Rise in the 1980s
Backed by PepsiCo’s distribution and advertising muscle, Slice grew rapidly after launch and became a meaningful player in the fruit-soda and lemon-lime segments. Its orange and other fruit varieties in particular found an audience, and for several years the brand was a visible national presence. The juice-added positioning was widely imitated, a sign that Slice had identified a real consumer appetite for sodas that felt at least slightly more natural.
Decline and retirement
Slice’s momentum did not last. As the lemon-lime and fruit-soda categories intensified, PepsiCo’s attention shifted, and the company eventually moved its lemon-lime efforts to a new brand, Sierra Mist, which took over much of Slice’s role. Over the 1990s and 2000s Slice steadily lost shelf space and marketing support, and it was effectively retired as a mainstream carbonated line in North America, surviving only in patches and in memory.
Revival as a different drink
In keeping with the pattern that runs through this archive, Slice did not vanish permanently. The brand name was later revived, repositioned in a form closer to a juice drink than to the carbonated fruit soda of the 1980s. That return trades on nostalgia for the original while acknowledging that the market it was born into has changed. For anyone tracing the arc of American sodas, Slice is a clear example of a brand that was large, then quietly shelved as corporate strategy moved on, and then brought back in altered form, its name outliving the exact product that made it famous.
A brand that outlived its product
Slice’s arc captures a distinctly modern kind of soda story. Unlike the fountain-era drinks in this archive, it was never a regional accident; it was a deliberate corporate launch, scaled fast on the strength of a marketing idea, and then set aside when that idea stopped serving the company’s larger strategy. The juice-added positioning it pioneered did not disappear with the brand: rivals borrowed it, and consumer expectations shifted permanently toward sodas that could claim some connection to real fruit. When PepsiCo moved its lemon-lime energy to a newer name, Slice was left to fade, but the equity in the name proved valuable enough to revive later in a different, juicier form. That separation of a brand from the exact product that made it famous is increasingly common in packaged goods, where a familiar name is an asset to be repositioned rather than a fixed promise. For this archive, Slice is the clearest example of the phenomenon: a soda that was big, then shelved, then brought back as something adjacent to what it once was.
Where Slice sits in the record
Within this archive Slice is a bridge between eras. It is not a fountain-era regional accident, nor a fly-by-night novelty, but a full corporate brand that rose fast, was quietly retired, and later returned in altered form. That three-part arc, launch, shelving, revival, is increasingly the normal life cycle of a packaged drink, and Slice documents it cleanly. Its lasting contribution, the idea that a mainstream soda could advertise real fruit juice, outlived the original product and reshaped what shoppers came to expect from the whole category.
Source: reference ↗