If we are what we eat, what we drink says a lot about us too.
We glean French sophistication from champagne. The name is in the drink for Scotch, but don’t forget Irn-Bru. Try Guinness in Ireland and the insanely extra-strong foreign version of Guinness in Nigeria.
So the drink is you: a reflection of your life, your outlook, maybe your ancestors. That is, unless the drink is Lilt, would-be “taste of the tropics”. Soon to be discontinued by manufacturer Coca-Cola and relaunched as Fanta pineapple and grapefruit. No longer “totally tropical”.
Everything must change, they say – but can’t say we’ll miss it. Lilt was a pineapple, grapefruit and mainly sugar-based drink created in 1974 in that good ol’ palm tree-laden, surf and sunshine paradise called the United Kingdom, just 5,000 miles away from “the tropics”, ie the Caribbean, the area it came to symbolise. Almost every aspect of Lilt, in a marketing sense, embodied and embraced Blackness, and specifically, Black Caribbeanness.
Over its five decades of existence, Lilt adverts served up images of delightfully relaxed photogenic white people drenched in the sun of the “tropics” while happy Black people ensured they had a steady supply of Lilt to keep them refreshed – while a reggae track boomed in the background. Following in the tradition of Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima, in the late 80s Lilt gave us The Lilt Man – a happy Caribbean man driving around on what looked like a milk float delivering Lilt (mainly to delighted white people).
By the late 90s Lilt had taken another cultural shift with its own version of Diamond and Silk, the conservative Black female vlogging duo who raised the cheerleading flag for Donald Trump. Lilt’s charming non-Trumpian equivalent was Hazel & Blanche (one of whom described drinking Lilt as the most fun she had with her clothes on).
By 2003, the once racially dubious yet somewhat wholesome Lilt adverts had taken a rather sexualised turn – with one advert showing a group of great-looking, bikini-clad women joining a man in a hot tub – who inexplicably pours Lilt over all of them.
Lilt and the 2020s couldn’t coexist for long, for authenticity sells, and Lilt could not have been less authentic as a “taste of the tropics” if it wore fake dreadlocks and called itself Bob Marley Brew.
It was the soft drink equivalent of blackface; a liquid echo of a variety show limbo dance. In a social media-driven age where accusations of cultural appropriation can spell doom for a brand and its manufacturer, authenticity seems more and more essential.
Coca-Cola has not revealed why it is pulling the brand, but one thing cannot be denied: when the cash register stops ringing, corporations start moving. Lilt had clearly, to coin a phrase, faded to black.
But then, who needs Coke’s totally synthetic tropical these days when you can enter a Caribbean food shop and leave with coconut water (delicious and good for the heart and kidneys), sop juice (high in vitamin C, good for the immune system), Malta (like Supermalt, but less sweet, said to lower cholesterol), sorrel (made from hibiscus calyces, fruits and spices – full of antioxidants) and myriad fruit juices adjacent to actual sun-kissed fruit.
And for those who truly yearn for the carbonated taste of the Caribbean they got from Lilt, scout around: some places sell Ting, Lilt’s fizzy veteran competitor, flavoured with Jamaican grapefruit juice concentrate.
It cultural but it’s business. All of this is business. Lilt, a brand once honed and pitched at Blackness and the tropics, has been rebirthed as a subbrand of Fanta – which was originally created to serve a Nazi Germany deprived of Coca-Cola. Go figure!
Nels Abbey is a writer, broadcaster and former banker. He is the author of the satirical book Think Like A White Man
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