It shouldn’t be any surprise that the only place you can buy poutine-flavored Jones Soda is Canada.
Canadians, it seems, are asking, “Why sell it at all?”
The Seattle-based bottler has released the cheese-and-chips-and-gravy flavor for a limited time only north of the 49th parallel.
Only a few thousand bottles are available in Canada’s largest provinces: British Columbia, Quebec and Ontario.
“These programs we do for fun,” VP of operations, Eric Chastain, told the Toronto Star.
“It doesn’t take a lot of resources and there’s a lot of marketing value in doing them… It gives us a chance when we have this attention paid to these fun flavors to remind people about the other flavors that we have that you can drink every day.”
Canadians are apparently mixed on getting such attention paid to them.
On the Jones Soda Facebook page, some fans ask for wider distribution (“Calgary, please”) while others question the sanity of drink makers (“ewww” or “I thought Lays Chicken and Waffles was ridiculous”).
For those who haven’t had the privilege, poutine is Canadian comfort food that piles cheese curds on French fries. It’s all covered in gravy, giving the quick-melting curds a stringy, gooey texture.
The mess originated in the French-speaking province of Quebec, where cheese making is an art form.
The soda itself looks like… well, something you might find inside a spittoon on the floor of an old west saloon.
It might taste the same, too, if only we could find someone willing to drink either.
“It wasn’t quite so instantly repulsive that I had to spit it out, but it was bad enough that I had to stop and think about what I was doing,” Canadian journalist Peter Nowak writes at Macleans.ca.
He described it as liquid potato chips, cardboard and mustard, or “maybe the worst-tasting thing I’d ever drunk.”
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