Reviews of New Food: Sunshine La Croix

“What do you think sunshine tastes like?” La Croix asks on its website and in the marketing materials for the launch of its latest flavor of sparkling water. You won’t be given the chance to guess, because they immediately answer their own question with “The Deliciously Fascinating Taste of WONDER!”

First of all, don’t tell me to ponder a riddle without giving me the time and resources to properly do so. And second, that tagline gets me no closer to a meaningful resolution. I see what you’re doing, La Croix. I’m an advertising professional, and I, too, can weave a mesmerizing chrysalis out of the silky strands of wordy bullshit. What is the texture of memory? What is the smell of regret? If you’re going to ask, let me cook.

I’ve been experimenting with a no-to-low-alcohol lifestyle, and when the universe taketh, something else must giveth. This means I now overrely on other pastimes like exercise, masturbation, and drinking an unsettling quantity of flavored sparkling water when my brain demands to collect on its dopamine debt. After visiting six different stores, I finally secured a case of Sunshine La Croix to pour into my ever-widening void.

But back to the question at the heart of this mystery in a can. What does sunshine taste like? Well, it depends on who you ask. According to the World Health Organization, solar UV radiation tastes like a group 1 carcinogen. But if you asked me, I’d say Sunshine La Croix tastes incredibly sweet, slightly menacing, and weirdly familiar. Maybe what they mean by “the taste of wonder” is “I wonder why this tastes like something I drank out of a trash can during my second year at Tulane.” I mean that positively. It’s delicious.

By La Croix’s own admission, sunshine tastes of citrus and tropical zest. You wouldn’t arrive at that conclusion by looking at the packaging design for clues. La Croix has chosen the sunflower to represent this flavor concept, and the box depicts hoards of them growing alongside a river. I personally associate the sunflower with family road trips, seeing swaths of them, highway adjacent, next to signs boasting “Meth Free in Tennessee.” It’d be natural to assume the taste of Sunshine La Croix is floral or at least borrowed from landlocked flavors like berries or orchard fruit. But you’d be wrong. The sunflower is a red herring, and you were a fool to fall for it.

La Croix’s Sunshine flavor comes on the heels of last year’s Strawberry Peach release—a flavor union as uninspired and predictable as a sixty-year-old man with a twenty-eight-year-old second wife. But Sunshine? Now here’s an interesting idea. With Sunshine, La Croix admits that we’ve pushed reality about as far as we can, and now it’s time to pivot towards the intangible.

Rejoice! For we have been liberated. Unshackled are we now from the restraints of our terrestrial flavor prison. My body feels weightless and on fire—like what I bet it feels like to be hit with a taser. If a sunshine-flavored beverage exists, what else is possible?

From Cherry Blossom to Beach Plum to Hibiscus and Mojito, I feel like La Croix has spring and summer thoroughly covered. But why is there no La Croix for the rest of the year? They’ve focused exclusively on the fun and sun crowd, but what about mood and brood? There’s a La Croix for a rousing sail on the South Seas, but no La Croix for an ill-fated voyage through the Northwest Passage. We need a La Croix to get us through the winter. One for the literary set, the writers and romantics, the bohemians and the mall goths alike. We need cardamom and fireplace ash, leather, spice, and book-pressed flowers. Whether or not that tastes good is none of my business. I’m a big ideas kind of gal.

Moonshine is already popular with cousin aficionados, but how about Moonlight? Or simply, the Moon. In fact, I’ll offer you a whole list of abstract moody flavors free of charge:

• Fog
• Pince-nez
• Trellised Ivy
• Hysteria
• The Moors
• Laudanum
• Daguerreotype
• Shipwreck

My final verdict on Sunshine La Croix: It’s really good. I give it ten out of ten precancerous moles. And, La Croix R&D: call me. Let’s talk about Q4.