Meet Heavy Soda: The Midwest’s Best-Kept Secret

My favorite thing about gas station fountain soda has always been the freedom of choice.

I select my cup, any size from standard 12-, 24-, or 32-ouncers all the way up to a 7-Eleven Team Gulp at a bladder-busting 128-ounces (that’s one liquid gallon). Next, I get to moderate the right amount of ice, if I opt for the frozen filler at all. Then I can either stay true to my favorite soda or stretch a full-sugar cola with its diet counterpart. Better yet, I can revel in my newfound liberty and start mixing Coke and Pepsi products at will. I can add Mountain Dew to my Dr Pepper, spritz my Coca-Cola with some Sprite, brighten my Pepsi with lemonade, or hit every tap for a so-called “graveyard” drink.

And now, legend has it, some Midwestern convenience stores are giving thirsty customers an additional option: heavy soda.

What Is Heavy Soda?

Soda fountains work by mixing carbonated water with flavored syrups that are essentially concentrates of our favorite sodas. When balanced, the result is the fizzy fountain drink we’re all used to (and admit it, we’ve all had some that leaned a bit too much toward the water). But according to Reddit and a few viral videos on Tiktoksome gas stations are tweaking the mix to lean (heavily) into the syrup, dispensing a more intensely-flavored, stronger version of Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Dr Pepper, and presumably others.

It’s difficult to say exactly why these particular stores started selling heavy soda, since it’s costing them more money, but they’re not the only ones doing it. In fact, this is part of the reasoning for why Coke tastes better from McDonald’s.

It’s not hard to see the bang-for-your-buck benefit for the consumer—some commenters in the online discourse theorize that the whole idea is to help people who buy their Big Gulps first thing in the morning and sip on them throughout their workday or on long road trips. With more syrup to start, the drink won’t lose its flavor as the hours pass and the ice melts.

Then there’s the buzz heavy soda is creating in online “soda pop culture.”  The Internet is full of blind taste tests featuring enthusiasts whose palates can pick out a Coke from McDonald’s versus one from Chick-fil-A, partially because of the syrup-to-water ratio. For these fountain soda sommeliers, something like this has been a long time coming. In fact, as a proud country of sweet-toothed soda jerks, many Redditors on the thread shared incidents of tinkering with the machinery to squeeze as much sweetness into their cups as they can get, with one saying, “As a kid we figured out that when you first pressed the cup against the actuator of the soda machine, the first little splash that came out was only syrup. We ended up just tapping the actuator on and off, filling the entire cup with pure syrup.”

While there is plenty of online speculation about the emergence of heavy soda, there is a dearth of people who’ve actually spotted these spouts in the wild. In fact, the web can’t even seem to decide exactly where this phenomenon is occurring. The only confirmed sighting seems to have been in the southeast part of Missouri. And as a gas station aficionado who lives and frequently travels the state, I have yet to spot a soda fountain with the “heavy” label. But if I do encounter a suped up heavy soda on my travels I will definitely pour a cup, no ice, to get the full-on sugar experience and report back. Sincere apologies to my dentist.