8 Classic Drinks Making a Comeback on Store Shelves

Nostalgia can be a powerful driver when it comes to buying all sorts of beverages, which is why you may want to head to your local store to grab a nostalgic drink that has made a comeback. Many of the ones now on shelves may not have been around in your lifetime or even in your country, but you’ll still want to see what all the fuss is about and what made them once beloved. Granted, some of the companies are making changes to something other than just the packaging design, like adjusting the sugar content, going diet, adding more caffeine, tweaking the flavor for modern palates, and even adding probiotics and nootropics. So, it may not be exactly the drink you remember for some.

The vintage sodas and alcoholic beverages that are on our list are being reintroduced around the world, with some being introduced in countries that have never experienced them before. Others are coming out in specific stores or locations (not necessarily in their original countries), with those of us who remember the drinks fondly hoping the relaunches go well so that we’ll see them on shelves near us soon. Hopefully, these nostalgic drinks from yesteryear will be here to stay as long as customers keep buying them. If you’re ready to find out what nostalgic drinks you should be looking for and where you can expect to find them, we have a list of eight for you.

The oldest drink on our list that has made a comeback is Double Diamond Beer. Originally an Indian Pale Ale (IPA), it first came out in the U.K. all the way back in 1876. It was extremely popular during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, with the company often selling 50 million pints per year. The last generation to have tried it before it disappeared in 2003 would have been some older millennials, with many people now of legal drinking age who weren’t even alive the last time it was sold.

The return comes after James Allsopp of Samuel Allsopp’s & Sons Brewery discovered the original recipe for the 1922 version of the beer. So, the beer’s comeback in the fall of 2024 was inspired by that recipe with a few modern tweaks. The new bright version of the beverage uses three types of hops to turn it extra hoppy: Citra, Mosaic, and Columbus. Plus, it’s a low-alcohol beer with just 3.8% ABV.

Some people who remember the beer from its heyday remember it fondly, while others thought it was fairly horrible swill. So, only time will tell if the modernization of Double Diamond Beer will endear it to both old and new generations of fans and turn it into a popular import beer. Hopefully, so. We especially like the design of the new cans. To marry the past with the present, it’s a modern design featuring the image of a tuxedoed older gentleman from another era enjoying the drink.

Goli Soda debuted in 1924 in Vellore, India, and was a brand and style many loved over the decades. The most magical and nostalgic feature of Goli Soda is its Codd bottle design, which uses a marble to stop the top, like Japan’s Ramune soda. The pressure of the fizz pushes the marble to the top where it stays in place with the help of a rubber gasket until you press it down with your thumb. Meanwhile, the bottle design prevents swallowing the marble.

Not only did popular national brands like Coke and Pepsi start to overshadow Goli Soda, but the bottles were also more expensive to make. The bottles were reusable, but they were also difficult to clean, which made many question just how hygienic some brands might be. In fact, some Indian cities even banned the bottles before 1947 because people were turning them into pressurized weapons. Still, the nostalgia for these bottles and the drinks inside lived on.

Goli Soda, rebranded as Goli Pop Soda, relaunched in February of 2025, coming in all sorts of flavors, like litchi, red guava, orange, passion fruit, and lemon. The nice thing is that you don’t have to go to India to experience this soda and its intriguing bottle style, as it has moved beyond India to other areas of the world like the U.S., Europe, the U.K., and even areas around the Persian Gulf. So, be sure to look for it in a store near you.

Childhood barely feels like it could have been complete without having Nesquik in the cupboard to create flavored, sweetened milk. And now, many of us will get to enjoy an old favorite flavor that’s making a comeback in 2025: banana.

Nesquik has been around since 1948, when it was called Nestle Quik. It moved out of the U.S. in the mid-1950s under the name Nesquik and has become beloved in over 100 countries around the world since that time. The first flavor was chocolate, with banana coming out in 1954. Strawberry followed in 1960, and vanilla debuted in 1979. Since then, many flavors have come and gone, including ones like cherry, mango, and honey. We even found a cinnamon churro one last time we were at the grocery store.

Some of us don’t remember ever seeing banana Nesquik, but for those who have, the idea of it coming back is like getting a piece of childhood back, as it hasn’t been available in some places around the world since being discontinued in 2018. As of the writing of this article, banana Nesquik has made a comeback in a few countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. While it’s not available in the U.S. yet except as an import, we can certainly wish to see it on shelves in the future. In the meantime, we can keep putting chocolate Nesquik in our espresso martinis and milk.

While it’s been off the shelves since the early 2000s, Campa Cola is making a resurgence in India in 2025. This time, it’s hoping to move beyond India and become a new favorite for cola-lovers worldwide. But can it compete with all the popular colas already on the market?

Campa Cola was born in India in 1977 when the License Raj set up a lot of rules that discouraged foreign companies from selling their products in India. Coca-Cola pulled out of the country rather than reveal its secret formula and had to give up 60% of its equity shares. With Coca-Cola gone, it opened up opportunities for home-grown cola companies. In fact, the name comes from the word “campaign,” reflecting the drive for allowing Indian-owned companies to outcompete more expensive foreign competitors. While Campa Cola was once well-known and beloved, it started to disappear in the 1990s when Pepsi entered the country and Coca-Cola followed to compete. The cola brand Thums Up survived and thrived when Coca-Cola acquired it to compete against Pepsi. By the early 2000s, Thums Up had pushed Campa Cola off the shelves and into people’s distant memories.

In 2025, Reliance Industries, Campa Cola’s new owners, began working to revive the brand. It is reviving some of the old advertisements for nostalgia’s sake, but is trying to appeal to a modern market with a lower-sugar recipe, new flavors, and biodegradable bottles. Plus, it has plans to export it to other countries. You can already get it from some Indian markets in the U.S.

If you’re a fan of non-caffeinated fruit sodas, you’re probably thrilled to see Slice back on store shelves. If you’re trying to remember when you first saw Slice on store shelves, it debuted as a lemon-lime competitor of Sprite and 7-Up back in 1984.

PepsiCo first introduced Slice to the world, and its “We got the juice” campaign slogan reminded everyone that, unlike its competitors, it contained 10% real fruit juice. Before long, the brand had branched out to offering flavors other than lemon-lime. Orange was another citrus offering, but the brand also had a tropical punch flavor and singular fruit flavors like strawberry, pineapple, and grape. The drink brand slowly fizzled out, with none to be found by 2010.

Fast-forward to January of 2025, and Slice was suddenly back on store shelves again as Slice Healthy Soda. This time, it’s made by Suja Life instead of PepsiCo, and Suja Life has added a few new twists to its real-fruit-juice formula. It now contains prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics; 5 grams or less of sugar; and no high-fructose corn syrup. Plus, it has more fizz than ever. It also started its new life with some old favorites, like lemon-lime, orange, strawberry, and grape. Plus, grapefruit spritz joined the fruity lineup. Plus, there are some exciting new additions, including ginger ale and cola flavors. However, the lower sugar content is accomplished by a combination of organic cane sugar and stevia leaf extract, which gives the ratings mixed results.

When Jolt Cola first came out in 1985, it already looked retro. It was especially popular during the 1980s and 1990s, but was still around until 2009, when the company was inundated with competition and went bankrupt. While it didn’t seem to resonate with consumers during its brief return in 2017, Jolt has some new tricks up its sleeve for its early 2025 comeback.

Before highly caffeinated energy drinks were a thing, Jolt provided consumers with “all the sugar and twice the caffeine” of ordinary caffeinated sodas — thus, its name. A 12-ounce can provided 70 milligrams of caffeine back in the day, which is a little more than double the amount of caffeine in the same amount of Coca-Cola. However, that’s not such a huge feat anymore with all the energy drinks in the market. So, the drink is upping the caffeine game on its comeback. 

With Jolt Cola’s 2025 return, a 16-ounce can now has 200 milligrams of caffeine — over 73% more milligrams of caffeine per ounce than it had back in the 1980s. Plus, the company is jumping on the same bandwagon as other energy drinks, switching out sugar with sucralose, adding vitamins, ingredients to enhance focus, and ingredients to fuel your metabolism. These days, it has plenty of cola energy drink competition, like Celsius and even Coca-Cola Coke Energy. So, we hope the nostalgia factor plus the new updates bring it more success this time around.

If you were a teen or young adult in the 1990s, chances are, Bacardi Breezer was your cheap and sweet gateway drink to the world of alcoholic beverages. Within a year of its 1990 debut, the U.S. had gone through a record 4.06 million cases of the rum-based fruity beverages that came in a personal-sized bottle with just 4% alcohol. However, they hadn’t been on shelves for a decade until their 2025 comeback.

Bacardi Breezer followed on the coattails of Bartles and Jaymes’ fruity wine cooler success in the 1980s, but was a fruity rum-based cooler instead. The single-serve cocktail drink idea had other companies jumping on the wine cooler and alcopop bandwagon soon after. By 1993, Bacardi Breezer was making its way beyond the U.S. to places like the U.K., Canada, European countries, Australia, and even India. However, by 2015, the brand was discontinued and replaced with more grown-up beverages. There’s no smoking gun for its demise, but the style of drink has long been demonized and sometimes even banned for being too tempting and accessible for young people.

For its 2025 summer return, the brand is once again targeting young drinkers. However, it’s also targeting the nostalgia crowd who fondly remember Bacardi Breezers from their youth. At first, they’re just coming back to the U.K. and Ireland with various flavors, like orange, lime, watermelon, blackberry, mango, and strawberry. But perhaps they will reappear elsewhere in the near future.

While we may have other favorite Coca-Cola flavors that we’d hope would be returning, the flavor some of us got back at the beginning of 2025 is Coca-Cola lime. While many of us are still having to slice up real lime and squeeze it into our cola to enjoy it at home, the good news is that Coca-Cola is testing the waters with mini-roll-outs.

The first lime Coke was Diet Lime Coke, which debuted in 2004. It was popular enough that the cola giant decided to give everyone regular Lime Coca-Cola in 2005. The flavor only lasted on shelves for a couple of years. However, starting in 2009, you could get diet and regular lime cola as drink combinations in restaurants with Freestyle drink machines. So, you might have had it in restaurants, but you couldn’t buy it in stores for most of this time. Although it seems it was available occasionally in some countries in the 2010s.

Lime Coke seems to be returning slowly across the globe. The U.K. got four sizes of Lime Coca-Cola and three sizes of Zero Sugar Lime at the beginning of 2025, but it was a slower roll-out for the Zero Sugar version, starting in just a few stores. The 2025 summer arrival in the U.S. is similar, with Lime Coke coming back to just a few stores in the Kroger family. So, if you’re a fan, keep your fingers crossed that it eventually lands in a store near you.