Post #597870 by mig on Sat, Jul 16, 2011 12:02 PM

This is an old thread but here's an update on one of the GREATEST TIKI SWINDLES EVER. If you haven't read this thread in, say, nine years: Shasta soda had an online poll to pick the "crowd favorite". TC stuffed the ballot box... it's quite well documented in this thread.

To give this some historical context: this was in the VERY early days of TC. Nowadays... one thread here in TC could probably produce enough response for a tiki flavor to win. But back then (early 2002), it was so unheard of to have any sort of product with the word "tiki" on it that it was a really big deal. Otto from Tiki News emailed his list with a request to vote for it; and this thread popped up on TC. People really rallied behind this and really got into it and followed what was going on.

So, what happened? Well, "Tiki Punch" soundly won the vote. And at the time, I worked half a mile from Shasta headquarters. Hanford and I discussed what to do, and decided that I would go into their office one day sometime in the near future and fess up to the fact that we had pranked them.

Just as I was about to do it... Shasta came out with all new packaging for Tiki Punch that loudly proclaimed "VOTED WORLD'S GREATEST FLAVOR!!"

This was, of course, thanks to us.

And due to this... they also slapped the word "tiki" on their new flavor variants. So after this all went down, you could buy "Tiki Punch Orange Mango","Tiki Punch Mist", etc.

I saw that "VOTED WORLD'S GREATEST FLAVOR!!" packaging for years. It looks like it's finally kind of petered out... but wow, what a great prank! We (collectively) did it just for fun and to make a show of solidarity for the arcane concept of "tiki" that we all loved; and it ended up blowing up in a most hilariously awesome way, with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences.