Sonic Drive-In, Oklahoma City, launched a new line of freshly brewed green iced teas available in numerous flavors, including five sugar-free flavor mix-ins: peach, mango, raspberry, blackberry and mint. The sweet, diet and sugar-free green iced teas join the company’s current sweet and unsweetened freshly brewed black iced tea offerings.“Consumers have shown increased interest in green tea in recent years due to the refreshing taste and widely touted health benefits,” said James O’Reilly, chief marketing officer of Sonic, in a statement. “We recognized this growing trend and took the opportunity to be one of the first national quick-service restaurants to offer freshly brewed green iced tea. And because we are all about choices, we didn’t launch just one or two iced tea varieties but launched sweet and diet green iced tea with five new sugar-free flavor mix-ins. These new flavors, combined with our thousands of other iced tea flavor options, make it fun to make healthy choices.”
The five new flavor mix-ins and the diet green iced tea offerings are sweetened with sucralose and do not contain artificial flavors or colors. Consumers can take advantage of Sonic’s daily drink happy hour from 2 to 4 p.m. to try out the new iced tea varieties and flavor combinations for half price. In addition, all of Sonic’s freshly brewed iced teas can be purchased in gallon-size containers.
“After months of thoughtful iced tea mixology, we’ve nailed it,” said Chef Clas Petersson, vice president of product innovation, in a statement. “The flavor profile of green iced tea differs greatly from our other drink options, so the flavor mix-ins we created had to be equally special. We chose these five new flavors because of the way they complement the green iced tea and black iced tea and also because of the ability to add them to our pre-existing drink line-up, expanding our flavor offerings to our extremely creative and experimental guests.”
The integrated marketing launch of the new iced teas and flavors includes national TV ads featuring Sonic’s Two Guys, local radio and local print advertising, along with packaging and on-lot prominence and social media activity.
