Yogurt Pepsi Pops Into Japan

The people making fun of Pepsi White, Pepsico's new cola-yogurt drink, are forgetting something: You never know what might catch on in Japan. And indeed, the weirder a product is, the better chance it has in the Japanese marketplace.

As Time magazine notes: "No other country is as obsessed with novelty as Japan. While product launches in the U.S. are often the stuff of great fanfare and huge p.r. budgets—New Coke, anyone?—endless iterations on an edible theme are the norm in Japan."

Hence, Pepsi White, which really does look and sound pretty gross. Hence also, Pepsi Ice Cucumber and a couple of other, more sensible Pepsi drinks that have been introduced in Japan lately.

Pepsico, via its Frito-Lay unit, also sells a new Cheetos flavor in Japan: strawberry-chocolate.

As for Pepsi White, which is meant to evoke Christmas, Mike Schuster of Minyanville.com says it looks like "an Alka-Seltzer tablet was dropped into watered-down milk: A fizzy, cloudy-white horror."

Pepsico also surely didn't need Time to warn it that "Japanese consumers' affections are notoriously fickle" and that Pepsi White may not last very long at all. But when product launches serve as their own marketing tests, it's not that big a gamble. It's just the way business is done in Japan.

Meanwhile, Beveragedaily.com dutifully reports that Pepsi White "does not reflect a wider-company focus on harnessing the potential nutrition benefits of dairy beverages." That's mainly due to the fact that the product doesn't actually contain any yogurt.