There is a soda that is the color of a summer sky at the exact moment the fairground lights flick on. It is called Old Tyme Cotton Candy, it is made by New England Beverages, and it tastes like precisely what the label promises: a paper cone of spun sugar, a wristband for the rides, and the smell of a fair on a warm evening — somehow, impossibly, poured into a bottle. 🎪
We did not need this to exist. That’s the best part. Somebody made it anyway, billed it as “a nostalgic, sweet blue soda… a carnival in a bottle!”, and dropped it onto the shelf like a small act of joy. So today we’re not reviewing a product — we’re celebrating a flavor, a color, and the whole wonderful tradition of soft drinks that exist purely to make you grin.
The case for cotton candy flavor 🍭
Cotton candy is barely even a food. It is 99% air and one good idea. A few grams of sugar, spun into a cloud the size of your head, gone the instant it touches your tongue. It has almost no substance and almost no point — and that is exactly why we love it.
Because cotton candy isn’t really about taste. It’s about where you are when you eat it. The midway. The Ferris wheel turning slow against the dusk. The pink-and-blue clouds bobbing past on sticks, the sticky fingers, the warm-sugar smell hanging over the whole fairground. Cotton candy is one of the few foods whose entire job is to taste like a good day. Bottling that into a soda isn’t a gimmick — it’s a tiny feat of time travel.
A brief, delightful history of spun sugar 🦷
Here is the single funniest origin story in all of food: cotton candy was co-invented by a dentist.
In 1897, a dentist named William Morrison and a candy maker named John C. Wharton built a machine that melted sugar and flung it through tiny holes, spinning it into fine threads that piled up into a fluffy cloud. They patented it, called it “Fairy Floss,” and brought it to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair — where they sold thousands of boxes to wide-eyed fairgoers and launched a fairground staple that has never once gone out of style.
The name kept changing as it spread. Americans landed on “cotton candy.” Australians still cheerfully call it “fairy floss.” Parts of Europe know it as something closer to “sugar wool” or “old lady’s hair” (the Greeks went with Μαλλί της γριάς — yes, grandma’s hair). Different words, same cloud, same delight, the whole world over.
Why is it blue? 💙
Because of course it’s blue. But the story behind why “blue” tastes like anything at all is wonderful.
There is no blue fruit doing this work. Blue raspberry — the flavor your brain reads off anything this color — is essentially an invention. The loose ancestor is a real plant, the whitebark raspberry (Rubus leucodermis), but the flavor-and-color combo got standardized so that frozen-treat makers had a color that wasn’t already taken by cherry, strawberry, and watermelon red. Blue raspberry was the open lane. It stuck.
And so blue quietly became the universal shorthand for sweet, fun, and slightly unreal. Slushies. Snow cones. Popsicles. Sour candy. The blue raspberry ICEE. None of them taste like a real thing in nature — they taste like the idea of a treat. Old Tyme Cotton Candy soda is blue for the same reason the sky is the right backdrop for a fair: blue is just the color of carnival magic.
Novelty sodas are having a moment 🎉
Old Tyme Cotton Candy isn’t a one-off — it’s part of a small, joyful renaissance. Over the last couple of decades, the novelty and craft soda scene has bloomed: regional bottlers reviving old recipes, tiny producers brewing flavors no committee would ever approve, and the internet doing the rest by surfacing some delightfully weird local soda from three states over and handing it a national audience overnight.
It’s a whole category of drink that exists for no nutritional reason whatsoever — purely to be fun, to be photographed, to be passed across a table with a “you have to try this.” Birthday-cake soda. Pickle soda. Bacon soda (we don’t make the rules). And nestled happily among them, a bright blue bottle that tastes like a paper cone of spun sugar. Old Tyme fits this tradition perfectly: it isn’t trying to quench your thirst. It’s trying to make you smile. 🥤
Why this is on a good-news blog
Because somewhere, a beverage company looked at a fluffy pink cloud of carnival sugar and thought: what if we made it a drink, and what if it were the most outrageous shade of blue we could legally bottle? Nobody’s day was incomplete without cotton-candy soda. No nutritional gap was crying out to be filled. Somebody just made the world a tiny bit more fun on purpose — and then a dentist’s 1897 invention got to live one more delightful life, this time as something you twist open on a hot afternoon. The fair, it turns out, never really ends. It just comes in a bottle now. 🎪💙
Found a gloriously over-the-top soda or snack in your corner of the world? Sign the guestbook and tell us — the best ones headline the next Crazy Snacks. And if you missed it, here’s Crazy Snacks, Vol. 1. 🍿
