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Sonic adds green iced tea to beverage lineup

April 1, 2013

Sonic today announced the launch of its new line of green iced tea, including five new flavor mix-ins — peach, mango, raspberry, blackberry and mint.

The teas are brewed fresh and include sweet, diet and sugar-free flavors. They join the current sweet and unsweetened black iced tea offerings and elevate Sonic's selection of drink combinations to more than 1 million, according to the company.

"Consumers have shown increased interest in green tea in recent years due to the refreshing taste and widely touted health benefits," said James O'Reilly, Sonic chief marketing officer. "We recognized this growing trend and took the opportunity to be one of the first national quick-service restaurants to offer freshly brewed green iced tea. And because we are all about choices, we didn't launch just one or two iced tea varieties, but launched sweet and diet green iced tea with five new sugar-free flavor mix-ins."

The five new flavor mix-ins and the diet green iced tea are sugar-free and sweetened with Splenda, and contain no artificial flavors or colors. The new iced teas and flavors can be combined into blends such as mango sweet black iced tea, blackberry green iced tea and peach diet green iced tea.

Guests can take advantage of Sonic's daily drink happy hour from 2 to 4 p.m. and try the new varieties for half price. In addition, all of Sonic's iced teas can be purchased in gallon size.

Chef Clas Petersson, Sonic's vice president of product innovation, leveraged past experience in green tea product development in Asia to develop the new green iced tea options. The team spent months testing the product before choosing the final version.

"The flavor profile of green iced tea differs greatly from our other drink options, so the flavor mix-ins we created had to be equally special. We chose these five new flavors because of the way they complement the green iced tea and black iced tea, and also because of the ability to add them to our pre-existing drink line-up, expanding our flavor offerings to our extremely creative and experimental guests," Petersson said.

The integrated marketing launch of the new iced teas and flavors includes national television ads featuring Sonic's iconic Two Guys, local radio and local print advertising, along with packaging and on-lot prominence and social media activity.

Check out the new TV ad below.

Read more about food and beverage promotions.