Recognize the name Jolt Cola? The 1980s soda aims to make a comeback — this time with even more caffeine
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Jolt Cola, the soda brand that gained attention in the 1980s for offering “all the sugar and twice the caffeine,” is heading back to stores in 2025. This time, it’s promising more than twice the original caffeine content.
Jolt Cola, the soda brand that gained attention in the 1980s for offering “all the sugar and twice the caffeine,” is heading back to stores in 2025. This time, it’s promising more than twice the original caffeine content.
Once marketed as an alternative to Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Jolt Cola will now join the crowded energy-drink market with the likes of Red Bull, Monster and Celsius. It will be marketed as a nostalgic drink due to its past reputation, according to Redcon1, the sports nutrition brand leading the relaunch.
“There’s a neat way to bring something back where it’ll pay homage to what once was, yet we can do it in a very modern way,” Ryan Monahan, chief marketing officer at Redcon1, told CNN.
Jolt Cola will come in 16-ounce cans and be priced at about US$2.50 or $3. It will have 200 milligrams of caffeine, up from around 70 milligrams in a 12-ounce can in 1985.
This relaunch marks the third release in the United States for Jolt Cola. In 2009, the brand’s company filed for bankruptcy protection. Jolt Cola would briefly resurface on shelves at Dollar General stores in 2017 before the chain stopped selling it in 2019.
When Redcon1 announced in October that it would reintroduce Jolt Cola, it could have brought it back as a soda. But growth in the energy-drink market has outpaced the soda market, prompting Jolt Cola to instead compete against the energy drinks that Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Dr Pepper have a stake in rather than those brands’ signature soda products.
The energy-drink market has long been dominated by Red Bull, but beverage giants have found their way into the industry in recent years. In 2015, The Coca-Cola Company bought a 16.7 per cent stake in Monster Beverage Corp. PepsiCo has a major stake in energy-drink maker Celsius Holdings and acquired Rockstar Energy in 2020 for $3.8 billion. In October, Keurig Dr Pepper announced it would spend more than a billion dollars to acquire energy-drink maker Ghost by 2028.
