What is Fresca Soda?
Fresca is a grapefruit flavored soda that originated on the east coast and picked up popularity during the many yuppie diet crazes of the 1980s. It is an anomaly in the soda industry for being one of the only sugarless sodas not to say "DIET" on the can or be explicitly marketed as a diet soda in advertising.
The taste of Fresca is amazingly complex for being a soda without calories; how it can have no calories and contain grapefruit juice from concentrate, two types of plant oils, and carob bean gum is a feat of modern food science! It hits the tongue with a bright, tart zing which transforms into a relatively heavy (for a sugarless soda) grapefruit flavor intermixed with aspartame that stays in the mouth long after you swallow.
It has been reported by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin that Lyndon Baines Johnson loved Fresca. He went so far as to have installed in the Oval Office a Fresca soda fountain that operated by pushing a button on his desk
chair.