You can find Sprite at gas stations, food courts, airport lounges, and soda fountains in 190+ countries. But there’s one flavor you can’t find unless you’re floating somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.
It’s called Royal Berry Blast. And it might be the most elusive (and confusing) version of Sprite ever made.
No one knows exactly what it tastes like. There’s no can, no bottle, no press release. The only way to try it is on one of Royal Caribbean’s cruise ships, where it flows from a Coca-Cola Freestyle machine like a fizzy, purple-coded secret handshake.
Coca-Cola and Royal Caribbean teamed up to create the exclusive Sprite flavor back in 2019 for the cruise line’s 50th anniversary. Since then, it’s become a cult favorite for people who stumble onto it mid-cruise, get obsessed, and then realize it’s nowhere else on Earth.
It’s not advertised or sold in stores. It’s just… there. If you know, you know.
Freestyle machines are available on 22 of Royal Caribbean’s 29 ships—ships like Icon of the Seas, Star of the Seas, Wonder of the Seas, and they dispense everything from classic Diet Coke to weird soda-spa water hybrids. But the Royal Berry Blast Sprite? That’s the crown jewel.
Even the soda itself plays tricks on you. It comes out purple, which screams “grape,” but the flavor? Total mystery. Some people say it tastes like vanilla and lemon-lime, others say it’s a mix of blue raspberry and tropical berries, and a few swear it’s Sprite mixed with a faint memory of grape soda from their childhood.
It’s hard to describe Royal Berry Blast without sounding like you’re making it up. One reviewer said it reminded them of the McDonald’s Sprite hack (Sprite + vanilla soft serve). Another said it tasted like “grape soda and Sprite had a baby.” One TikTok user just called it “a purple mood.”
What it tastes like: something between raspberry, blueberry, maybe a little blackcurrant, with just enough vanilla to give it dessert energy. It doesn’t feel like it should work, yet it does.
It’s also perfectly engineered for sipping under the sun, walking a deck with sea spray in your hair, maybe on your third piña colada. It’s that kind of soda.
You can’t get it anywhere else. Not at Disney, not at World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, not even through a flavor hack on the Freestyle app. Coca-Cola made it for Royal Caribbean and never looked back.
And while that makes it feel special when you’re on board, it also means soda nerds and flavor hunters are out of luck unless they’re willing to board a 200,000-ton ship to taste it again.
Whether this kind of exclusivity becomes the new norm for Coke’s Freestyle experiments remains to be seen. But one thing’s for sure: if Royal Berry Blast ever makes it to land, people are going to lose it. Until then, you’ll have to book a cruise, dodge a few seagulls, and find the nearest Freestyle machine at sea.