Sodastream phasing out many diet flavors. What are the alternatives?

September 24, 2015 1:54 PM

Sodastream seems to have stopped producing many of their flavors. So far the alternatives for diet flavoring seem to be Crystal light, Prairie Moon, or shaved ice flavoring syrup. Prairie Moon gets bad reviews for their flavorings. What other diet alternatives exist? I am not interested in making my own as a weekend project, I'm looking for point-click-buy convenience.
posted by benzenedream to Food & Drink (15 answers total)

Which diet ones do you think are discontinued? They just changed the packaging on their syrups, and though I do see a few missing, they look mostly the same, and the old packaging's still listed on the website.

I like the squirty 'water enhancers', where even the ones with natural sweeteners tend to be low-cal.
posted by holgate at 2:02 PM on September 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've been recently drinking Stur - works well as a carbonated option - stevia sweetened.
posted by teststrip at 2:03 PM on September 24, 2015

Fountain Mist is one of the discontinued ones and we're missing it terribly. If you find a substitute, please share!
posted by Stacey at 2:15 PM on September 24, 2015

Best answer: I like the sugar free Torani syrups to make Italian sodas. Cost Plus Word Market usually has a good selection. (You can also order them on Amazon, but I've had mixed results on that -- sometimes you get bottles leaking.) I find that the caramel flavor makes something resembling cream soda, and I like many of the fruit flavors. Since the sugar-free versions are much runnier than the sugar syrups, they mix really easily. I just pour a bit into my glass, and the bubbling of the water mixes it well enough.

I also use the water enhancers like Mio, which basically makes sparkly gatorade in my mind (i.e. you get "blue" flavor or "purple" flavor, but not really anything that tastes like actual fruits or whatever), if you're into that kind of thing. Certain flavors taste better than others. Safeway near me has them, but Target seems to be phasing them out.
posted by ktkt at 2:37 PM on September 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

Bittermens orange cream citrate.
posted by feral_goldfish at 2:50 PM on September 24, 2015

If you live in New England or the Hudson valley you can get Polar Seltzer, which comes in tons of different flavors.
posted by brujita at 3:38 PM on September 24, 2015

It ain't fancy, but I like those Kool-Aid (and Crystal Lite, and whatever other ones I find) liquid drink mixes. Each glass can be a different flavor!
posted by DingoMutt at 4:33 PM on September 24, 2015

Best answer: I am a big MIO fan, especially the lemonade and the sweet tea flavors. I use them as a sugar-free mix for Vodka as well as drinking with water or tonic. I don't know if they can be used in a sodastream but there are a lot of flavors like blueberry and mango.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 5:10 PM on September 24, 2015

Don't know if this will work for you, and it doesn't actually answer your question, but I sometimes like just using lemon, orange, or (oddly) almond extract.
posted by 2 cats in the yard at 5:56 PM on September 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Diet cream soda and diet mango/orange seem to be gone.
posted by benzenedream at 6:54 PM on September 24, 2015

Best answer: ktkt touched on it but I wanted to add a bit more.

You can use sparkling water and mix it with the Torani syrup. The syrups are pretty inexpensive (~$6-9) and come in an absolutely mind boggling array of flavors. Get the pump attachment for the bottles and two maybe three pumps in a cup gives you a fizzy, sweet drink that's better(ish) for you and for far less money than a Sodastream and you can customize the flavors quite a bit more.

If you want sweet and fizzy, can't get much better than Torani and sparkling water.
posted by Socinus at 7:42 PM on September 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I'm another that uses my soda stream almost exclusively with Mio (and other brands of) water flavoring. Right now I'm drinking a lot of the Mio peach mango. I keep my carbonated water in the fridge and just add a couple squirts to each individual glass, but there's no reason you couldn't flavor the whole bottle at once.
posted by cgg at 9:15 PM on September 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The specific squirty water enhancers I like the most are Teisseire Gourmet Drops which sound fancy and French but are actually a relabelling of Robinson's Squash'd as made in Ireland and sold in the UK. They are one of the very few ways for Americans to try a blackcurrant-flavoured drink, which I would very much recommend. They were apparently exclusive to SuperTarget but I found a stack of them in a closeout grocery which now has me worried they're not going to be around for much longer.

Another alternative low-cal way to flavour fizzy water from a SodaStream is through fancy cocktail bitters, where the bottles are more expensive than syrups but also last a lot longer, and the drinks are much lighter but also have a lot going on.
posted by holgate at 9:46 PM on September 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Tried some Mio, tastes pretty much like Crystal Light to me. The smaller flavor squirters seem like they have a high cost / volume flavored ratio. Next up, Torani!
posted by benzenedream at 12:09 AM on September 27, 2015

Response by poster: Diet Torani syrups are the winner. A little more tart and less sweet than the sodastream flavors, but very nice overall and reasonably priced. I just ordered them directly from Torani since finding the diet syrups was a PITA. Thanks everyone!
posted by benzenedream at 9:20 PM on November 12, 2015