When I first heard about this, I was intrigued. After all, seven different flavors of cream soda, all with the Shaq's smiling face on them? The potential for 'trainwreck' seemed to run quite high, to be totally honest. I mean... Shaq. Soda. That's not a combination that immediately springs to mind when you think of Mr. O'Neal. All right, yes, I suppose if the man can make Blue Chips and Kazaam, he can probably do whatever he damn well pleases but soda? The mind boggles.
There have been three cases of this stuff sitting, just waiting to be unleashed on the world at the Kum and Go on Burlington/Madison for at least a month now. This past Sunday, I stopped in, just to see if they had been finally, at long last, placed upon the shelves and to my amazement... they had.
So, I snagged a couple of cans. First thing that I noticed was the price. 99 cents isn't bad for a can of pop but when you take into account that Shaq is marketing these things through Arizona- a single can means 23.5 fluid ounces, it actually ends up being a pretty good deal. For my tasting, I went with orange cream and strawberry cream. There was also the option for blueberry cream but really, I've never been that big of a fan of blueberries so I skipped that one. I got to work, sat down and decided to play it safe and cracked the orange cream soda first.
The smell was promising. You could smell both cream and orange which is always a good sign and the taste was actually not half bad. I think there's a potential, especially with fruit based sodas to overdo it on the corn syrup so that you, the drinker, ends up trying to get the taste of sweet syrup off of your lips and end up almost slipping into a diabetic coma of some kind. No worries though: Shaq Soda delivers flavor. It is, the can informs me 'A Big Can For The Big Man' though the claim for it being 'ALL NATURAL' makes me laugh a bit though.
The Strawberry Cream soda was an equally pleasant experience. I'm not usually a fan of fruit flavored sodas to begin with. They've always struck me as being too sweet, the flavors outsized as if the makers want to make sure that the drinker really knows that they're drinking strawberry or orange flavored soda. While I'm a little curious as to how cream soda can be 'all natural, no artificial flavors and no artificial color' I suspect that the subtle, more pleasant flavoring could be a result of that.
At 90 calories a serving (for around 270 calories a can) these cans don't seem too out of line calorie wise either. Obviously, if you're serious about watching your calories you should probably skip these and stick to water instead. But that's the other nice thing about these things: I didn't feel like I was drowning in saccharine like I usually do when I drink regular pop.
Overall: This might be the greatest thing Shaq has done since Kazaam. Or possibly playing with Kobe. Far from a trainwreck, this is an odd, quirky concept that actually works really, really well.
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