How Shirley Temple became the flavor of 2025

When Ben Stiller goes out to dinner, he drinks between one and three Shirley Temples. 

But a fully-grown adult ordering a classic child’s beverage can elicit funny looks. So, to help cut the stigma, and the sugar, the actor, director, and producer launched his own soda company last month—called Stiller’s Soda—with a grown-up version of a Shirley Temple as one of its three flavors.

He simply wanted a version “that he could feel good about drinking himself,” says Stiller’s Soda cofounder Alexander Doman, a serial food and beverage entrepreneur.

Stiller’s isn’t the only soda company suddenly flirting with the Shirley Temple. In the past year, soda powerhouses and drink disruptors from 7UP and Gatorade to Spindrift and Bloom Pop have debuted Shirley Temple products. Even frozen yogurt chain 16 Handles got into the game.

The fizzy drink, ordered previously mostly at bars, has been a staple of American childhoods since the 1930s, when Shirley Temple herself was a young star on the big screen. Legend has it that the concoction—grenadine, lemon-lime soda, and a maraschino cherry—was created by West Hollywood bartenders so that Temple could enjoy a drink with her costars.

Everyone has their own Shirley Temple memory. Barb Stuckey, chief new product strategy officer at Mattson, a major food and drink developer for retailers and restaurants, remembers family outings to the Flower Drum Chinese restaurant in Baltimore in the ‘80s, ordering chop suey with a Shirley Temple. It made her feel like a grown-up. “She’s having a glass of wine, he’s having a beer, and he’s having this thing with a straw with a little umbrella,” she says. “I want to be part of this, whatever it is.”

That feeling has been passed down through generations, though few are still alive who recall the drink’s namesake. “I can’t imagine that more than 5 to 10% of Gen Zs have any clue who Shirley Temple was,” Stuckey says. “She was maybe the youngest-ever child star on the silver screen. She’s now become a maraschino cherry, pretty much.”

All the more eye-opening is that Gen Z is enamored with the drink. This could be due to the generation’s love of nostalgia, its lower alcohol use, and the mocktail’s effervescence  on social media.

These factors have combined to raise the drink’s profile among young people and made it something you don’t have to graduate out of—leading companies to go all in on stirring up their own batches.

“Arc of a new trend”

Mary Haderlein, the head of Mattson’s Chicago office, tracks the modern Shirley Temple revival back to around 2021 when, homebound during the pandemic, people were shaking their own cocktails. The Shirley Temple—and the Dirty Shirley, made with vodka—was easy and unpretentious, offering the comfort of nostalgia during a scary time. “All of these childhood favorites became these master brands ,” she says, as processed favorites like Oreos and Cinnamon Toast Crunch surged in sales. Young people had the time to post their colorful creations on TikTok.

At the same time, restaurants and bars were facing shutdowns and supply shortages, and Shirleys only required basic pantry ingredients. “They didn’t have to rely on an import that got caught up in the Suez Canal,” Haderlein says. When people returned to the in-real-life socializing they’d craved, the Dirty Shirley stayed popular; it was hailed as the drink of summer 2022 by The New York Times.

Its profile has continued to grow. Earlier this year, The Times profiled Leo Kelly, an 11-year-old known as the Shirley Temple King, who since 2019 has rated the drink at different restaurants on Instagram, docking points for slip-ups like too few cherries. One review, of a Shirley Temple at Evermore Resort, in Orlando—which had five cherries and a score of 9.6/10—received 335,000 likes last year.

Casey Ferrell, senior VP of consulting at marketing data firm Kantar, who focuses on how different generations embrace culture, says that even the youngest influencers can push trends into the public consciousness. (In the most embarrassing of snubs, Kelly declined my interview request.)

In the typical “arc of a new trend,” Haderlein says, something will become popular at independent restaurants, then move to chain eateries, and eventually become ready-to-drink products on grocery store shelves.

Wholesome ‘newstalgia’

7UP was the first major beverage brand to offer the Shirley Temple via retail, in October of 2024. Katie Webb, VP of innovation and transformation at its parent company, Keurig Dr Pepper, says that 7UP naturally had “equity” in the drink, given that a lemon/lime soda is the very base of the beverage. (Note: the Shirley Temple King prefers his with ginger ale.)

It was a limited run, for the holidays, and will return this year to capitalize on a season when multiple generations gather, toast, and embrace old traditions. “Gen Z are receptive to stuff that we think is nostalgic but that they never actually experienced,” says Kantar’s Ferrell says. Gen Z may use the word “wholesome” in this context. It’s a word they use a lot.

Webb likes the term “newstalgia” to describe Gen Z’s unique spin on the past. And as with everything Gen Z related, visuals are key. Today’s teen and 20-somethings are drawn to food and drinks with features that stand out on TikTok or Instagram, such as bright colors, textures, foams, and fizzes. To a degree, photogenic is more important than flavorful, and Shirley Temple plays right into that: it swirls, it bubbles, and it pops on the ‘gram.

They also like their beverages on the rocks. Cold drinks represented 75% of Starbucks’ U.S. sales in Q3 of 2024. “If you walk into a Starbucks, I dare you to find a single Gen Z that is drinking a hot beverage,” Stuckey says. 16 Handles knows. The frozen yogurt chain took this trend even further with its Shirley Temple cherry lime sorbet, launched as a limited run this past August.

Will a Shirley Temple without sugar still taste as sweet?

The downside of the traditional Shirley Temple is that it’s not exactly good for you. A typical serving could have between 30 and 60 grams of sugar, and up to 300 calories. Even Temple herself had issues with it, telling NPR in 1986 that she hated the “saccharine sweet, icky drink.”

“Holy cow, they have tons of sugar,” says Amy Steel Vanden-Eykel, chief growth officer at Spindrift, who was incentivized to create an alternative. In February, Spindrift launched its own version, with no added sugar or sweeteners. It’s made with real fruit, essentially just a higher ratio of juice to carbonated water than its seltzers. (Shirley Temple is one of five flavors in its new soda line, which includes other throwbacks like Strawberry Shortcake and Orange Cream Float.)

Spindrift’s tart iteration doesn’t taste all that much like a Shirley Temple to me. But the good-for-you modification is probably a smart move, given that one in three consumers say reducing non-healthy ingredients like high sugar in beverages is important, according to Mattson’s data.

Other brands have dialed back the sugar, too. 7UP released a zero-sugar version as part of its rollout last year. Bloom Pop, also owned by Keurig Dr Pepper, released a prebiotic Shirley Temple in July that’s low sugar and low calorie. In September, so did Slice, which PepsiCo relaunched this year as a gut-health drink brand after sunsetting it in the early 2000s.

The drink is also benefitting from the fact that Gen Z is famously not consuming as much alcohol as previous generations—about 20% less, consistent data shows. (It’s one of a handful of perceived “risky behaviors” they’re engaging in less, Ferrell says, along with driving and sex. In a chaotic-feeling world, they’re careful about “how much [risk] they’re willing to tolerate in their lives,” he says.)

But they still want fun drinks, and “wholesome” sodas become favorites for the “sobercurious” to bring to the party, without the stigma such adult mocktails may have had in the past.

44 bottles

Keurig Dr Pepper’s data shows that 72% of Gen Z try a new drink monthly, versus 44% of all Americans. This is great news for new flavor debuts, but worrisome news for the folks trying to build them into sustainable businesses. For 7UP, keeping the Shirley Temple flavor as a limited run makes sense.

Brands used to be the “arbiters of culture,” Ferrell says. Today, that power has tipped to the consumer. “Companies now need to be reactive to whatever’s hot on TikTok.”

When they pounce fast, it pays off. 7UP’s Webb, who says that the company is constantly monitoring social media to track “what kind of concoctions consumers might be making with our products,” notes that 67% of its Shirley Temple trialists were new to the brand.

Gatorade is also staying flexible. In June, the brand presented WNBA player Paige Bueckers with a special-edition flavor of her favorite drink, the Shirley Temple. The video of the presentation became the brand’s most commented-on piece of social content ever, says chief brand officer Anuj Bhasin. (The company then sent 44 bottles to Bueckers fans who commented on the Instagram post, the number being a nod to the points Bueckers scored when setting a rookie record.)

With only 44 bottles, the release could be considered a “brand activation,” a limited run of a product based on a disruptive cultural moment, with a campaign around it. “We are absolutely seeking to do more of these things,” Gatorade’s Bhasin says, adding that the company will rarely commit to making a new flavor like Shirley Temple permanent.

The next new thing

Although Gatorade maintains multiyear road maps, it also now keeps resources in reserve for forming a “quick-strike team” to execute last-minute campaigns based on fads and quick shifts in the zeitgeist. It now has a special development facility at its Valhalla, New York, R&D site to enable faster market turnaround; products produced at this site are not even meant for retail sale.

The good news for big beverage companies is that ginning up a new flavor like a Shirley Temple is relatively simple. They’re sourcing straightforward syrups from longtime suppliers, not mapping out new supply chains. “This is not rocket science—it’s lemon, lime, and cherry,” Stuckey says. When it comes to Shirley Temple, “it just feels like this is built for mass consumption.”

(Stiller’s cofounder Doman insists that its Shirley Temple soda had nothing to do with trends. He insists it was driven merely by Stiller’s own tastebuds, which signed off on every iteration until it was finished.)

But soon enough there will be a new thing, as there always is. “These same brands are going to have to tap into something else after this winds its way through everybody’s system,” Ferrell says.

What’s next? Mattson’s Haderlein is seeing a rise in bitter spritzes. Her colleague Stuckey isn’t betting against matcha.

Yet because of its history, the Shirley Temple also has staying power. “It does have a genuine cultural underpinning to it,” Haderlein says, predicting that it will likely endure, at least “peripherally,” as a part of childhoods across the country, no matter what generation.

How wholesome.

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