Pepsi's New Holiday Flavor Is Vanilla & Cream. Coke Drinkers Say They Had It Last Year

Pepsi launched its holiday flavor on Monday, and America searched for it with the urgency usually reserved for tornado warnings. The drink is Pepsi Vanilla & Cream, with a Zero Sugar version alongside, sold for a limited time in 12-packs of cans and 20-ounce bottles. A Pepsi marketing vice president, Gustavo Reyna, said the company knows how to make cola even more exciting, which is the sort of thing a man says right before he adds vanilla to cola.

The trouble is that the internet has a long memory and a short temper. Coca-Cola's holiday flavor in 2025 was Holiday Creamy Vanilla, in regular and Zero Sugar. After the flavor leaked in April, fans quoted by Sporked accused Pepsi of copying, and one wondered aloud where Pepsi could possibly have gotten the idea. I'd guess the same place it got the idea for brown sugar water in a red can: across the street.

In fairness, Pepsi has been sliding this way for a while. It already sells Wild Cherry & Cream, so cream was coming whether we wanted it or not, like a sixth birthday or the Rapture. Flavored colas are where the soda business has decided the money is, now that plain soda is something your doctor mentions in the same tone he uses for cigarettes.

The Pepsi-Coke war has been running for more than a century, and in all that time neither side has won a single battle anyone can remember except the one where Coke changed its recipe and had to apologize to the whole nation. So the strategy now is to wait a year and release the other fellow's Christmas. That's not a rivalry. That's two old men in a nursing home stealing each other's pudding.

Some fans are thrilled, mind you. Vanilla Pepsi has its loyalists, and the people who miss Pepsi Holiday Spice, which vanished years ago, will take anything with a snowflake on it. And who's to say the second vanilla holiday cola can't be better than the first? Sequels have beaten originals before. Not often, but it happened once, and they built a whole industry on the rumor.

Every December somebody invents a new way to sell you the same thing with a scarf on it. The trick isn't to resist. It's to wait till January, when it's half off and nobody remembers which company did it first.