Kraft Dinner has launched KD x Solly’s Cream Soda, a limited-edition collaboration with Solly’s Craft Soda that attempts to translate the flavour of boxed mac and cheese into a fizzy drink. The product went on sale in Canada on 23 September, available through Amazon, with participating retailers including Walmart expected to stock it from early October.
According to Solly’s Craft Soda, the drink is priced at $2.95 CAD per 355mL can. As Quartz reports, the cans are 12-ounce format, standard single-serve sizing, which suggests the collaboration is positioned as an everyday impulse buy rather than a novelty collector’s item, even if the flavour concept is anything but ordinary.
The Thinking Behind KD x Solly’s Cream Soda
Daniel Lundberg, Head of Marketing and Strategy at Kraft Heinz, addressed the obvious question directly. ‘A soda might be the last place you would expect to find KD,’ he said in a statement. The strangeness, in other words, was part of the strategy. The stated aim was to produce something unusual enough to generate conversation while still functioning as a drinkable soda rather than a stunt product.
Kraft Dinner has form here. Previous limited-edition departures from the standard blue box include KD Mac & Cheesecake and KD Ramen. Moving the brand into carbonated drinks is, however, a different order of ambition: those earlier experiments stayed within food; this one crosses into a category governed by completely different consumer expectations.
Cream soda, in its conventional form, is sweet and vanilla-forward, with a lightness that makes it easy drinking. Cheese, by contrast, is savoury, fatty and (in the case of Kraft Dinner’s famously vivid orange sauce) intensely processed in flavour. Whether those two profiles find any kind of harmony in a single can is the question the internet has been arguing about since the launch.
Online Reaction Splits Between Disgust and Demand
Social media responses have covered the full range. One person’s reaction on social media was blunt: ‘Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.’ Another questioned whether the whole launch was a misfired April Fools’ joke. A third managed both responses in a single comment: ‘That’s disgusting! (I’d like to try).’
The curiosity has extended beyond Canada’s borders. ‘Brb searching for cheap flights to Canada so I can try this lol,’ one person wrote. Another offered a simpler summary of the pull: ‘Crazy but I still NEED.’ It is the kind of reaction a marketing team designing a limited-edition collaboration hopes for: the product has generated reach well beyond the retail footprint it actually occupies.
For now, Kraft Heinz has not announced any plans to bring KD x Solly’s Cream Soda to US shelves, which means the Canadian exclusive status is doing some of the marketing work itself. Scarcity and geography tend to sharpen appetite, even for something people claim to find revolting.
The limited-edition nature of the release also sets a natural deadline. There is no indication of how long stocks will run, and with Walmart distribution not confirmed until early October, the window for Canadian consumers to try the product at retail may be tighter than it initially appears. At $2.95 CAD a can, the financial risk of satisfying the curiosity is low, even if the sensory risk remains an open question.