15 Popular Soda Brands From Around The World

No matter where you are in the world, there's something special about popping open an ice-cold soda. Although the United States has a staggering number of its own soft drink brands, there are plenty of specialty drinks that hail from other countries and regions across the globe. Some of them have transcended borders and can now be found far beyond their places of origin, while others remain decidedly local treats that you'll have to travel to taste.

It's no secret that Coca-Cola is the most popular soda brand around the world; you'll find it in almost every corner of the map (although some people swear that a Coke tastes different from country to country). But if you're hoping for a glimpse into other cultures and culinary tastes, consider seeking out local soft drinks, many of which feature unique ingredients and regional flavors.

These fizzy, sweet concoctions are often important cultural symbols, and many of them even have historical significance. Some stand out for their interesting origin stories, while others are intriguingly obscure or just plain delicious.

This drink takes its name from the guaraná plant, which is native to Brazil's Amazonian regions. The plant produces fruits that contain small seeds, which have a naturally high caffeine content. This convenient feature has made guaraná extract a popular addition to energy drinks around the world — but in Brazil, it's most commonly found as the key ingredient in guaraná soda, which is somewhat of a national symbol.

By far, the most iconic brand of guaraná soda is Guaraná Antarctica, with its highly recognizable red-and-green packaging. It has a subtle fruit flavor and slightly less sugar than Coke and similar soft drinks. The brand is widely associated with Brazilian culture and heritage, thanks in large part to 20th-century marketing campaigns that aimed to position it that way. Today, it's also produced in Argentina, Bolivia, Portugal, and Japan and is available across the world – so you can probably try it without hopping on a flight.

You might know Orangina for its distinctive bulbous bottle — designed to mimic the shape of an orange, naturally — or its iconic vintage ads, which depict a sun umbrella made from a cartoon swirl of orange peel. Then again, maybe not; although it can certainly be found in the U.S., this is one of the more universally popular brands across the world, found heavily in France and other European countries.

Although today it's somewhat of a French icon, Orangina was actually developed in Algeria by a Valencian pharmacist. He called it Naranjina (a play on the Spanish word for "orange"), but the first bottles sold in France were rebranded as Orangina. Today, you can also find Naranjina, made with Valencian oranges, in Spain.

Orangina is fizzy and fresh, owing its strong citrus flavor to a blend of real orange, lemon, mandarin, and grapefruit juices, plus 2% orange pulp. The original variety is by far the most common, but you might also come across red-orange, light, and tropical flavors, the latter of which adds mango, pineapple, passion fruit, and apple juices into the mix.

Many Americans are fondly familiar with Jarritos. These jewel-toned fruit sodas come in textured glass bottles with a simple orange and green logo. The brand was created in 1950 by a Mexican chemist known as El Güero and started being sold in the U.S. in 1988. A few decades later, it's widely available across North America and in dozens of countries worldwide.

The original Jarritos flavor was, interestingly enough, coffee. This was followed by tamarind, which you can still find today, and later mandarin, lime, guava, pineapple, passion fruit, strawberry, grapefruit, watermelon, mango, fruit punch, jamaica (hibiscus), and Mexican cola. In the beginning, the different flavors weren't even labeled; their bright — and in some cases, practically neon — colors were enough to distinguish them on the shelves.

Few of the world's popular soda brands are this classic, but Jarritos hasn't rested on its laurels. It does an exceptionally good job of keeping up with the times. The company has an astounding social media presence. It's also launched collaborations with apparel brands like Nike and Findlay Hats and was an official partner of the 2023 X Games.

In other words, Jarritos has figured out how to make soda incredibly cool. And if you're looking for a bit of lightly conspiratorial brand trivia to bring up at parties, the company purportedly possesses secret mandarin groves somewhere on the Yucatán Peninsula (it's not clear why exactly they're secret, except maybe to generate intrigue).

There are plenty of alternative colas on the market, but Fritz-Kola is a quintessentially German take on this classic flavor. Made with natural ingredients, including kola nut and green coffee bean extracts, it's dramatically dark in color — almost black, in fact — and contains about 82 milligrams of caffeine per bottle (25 milligrams per 100 milliliters). For reference, the same amount of Coke has just 33 milligrams of caffeine.

This elevated caffeine content was actually among the brand's founding principles. super-caffeinated Fritz-Kola was invented in 2002 in a dorm room by two college students named Lorenz Hampl and Mirco Wiegert, who wanted to create something better than the average mass-produced soda brands from across the world. The company has kept the same general aesthetic since its launch: glass bottles with minimalistic black-and-white labels depicting the two founders' faces.

These days, Fritz-Kola is available in sugar-free and superzero (also sugarless, but with a slightly different formula) versions. There's also the fruity Fritz-Limo orangeade and lemonade and the organic Fritz-Spritz, which comes in apple and rhubarb flavors.

The difference between ginger ale and ginger beer may not be common knowledge, but one sip of this classic Caribbean soda is explanation enough. Barritt's Ginger Beer is both spicy and sweet, made with natural ginger to ensure it tastes like the real thing.

There are two classic versions of Barritt's: canned and bottled. And while the packaging may not seem all that important, in this case, it actually makes a difference. The canned stuff is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, while the glass bottles contain only pure cane sugar. Then, of course, there's the sugar-free iteration, recognizable for its light blue label, which uses a combination of sucralose and acesulfame potassium (also known as Ace K).

Barritt's is a classic soft drink across the Caribbean, although these days, it's pretty popular stateside, too. The company is still based in its home country of Bermuda, but it's also produced in the U.S. You're likely to find it at craft cocktail bars, where it plays a starring role in drinks like the Moscow Mule (with vodka) and the Dark and Stormy (with dark rum).

Unlike the other drinks on this list, ramune is a Japanese soda that isn't one specific brand but rather a variety that's marketed by a few different companies, including Hata Kosen and Sangaria. Its defining feature isn't actually the soda itself, which is clear and most commonly lemon-lime flavored. Instead, it's known for its iconic packaging: a glass bottle sealed with a marble, designed to keep the contents fizzy.

This method of sealing carbonated drinks, which is known as a Codd-neck bottle, isn't actually unique to ramune; it was commonly used in many countries before modern bottle caps were developed. But today, it's pretty much only used for Japanese ramune and Indian banta. To open it, you have to remove a small plastic device from the cap and use it to release the marble, which is then caught in the pinched part of the bottleneck so it doesn't fall into the drink.

It might be the distinctive shape of the bottles, the interactive aspect of opening them, or the novelty of watching a marble roll around above your soda, but ramune has become incredibly popular both within and outside of Japan. You can find it in the U.S. at specialty stores and even larger retailers like World Market.

Many visitors to Spain are surprised to find out that sangria, supposedly the national beverage, is actually far less common than tinto de verano: red wine mixed with gaseosa (soda). There's a solid chance that the soda in question is La Casera — and even if it's not, it'll probably be referred to that way. This brand is so ubiquitous in Spain that casera has become a generic term for soda in general, especially when it's being used as a mixer.

Its name literally means "homemade" in Spanish, but La Casera is far from an artisanal operation today. The brand's offerings now include not only the classic unflavored lemon, mint, apple, orange, and cola sodas but also premixed tinto de verano and aperitifs made with cider, vermouth, and verdejo wine. According to the company's website, it's been working on lowering the sugar content of its products for years, and 98% of them are now low- or zero-calorie.