Brooklyn Cannery’s Prebiotic Sodas is a new line of low calorie carbonated soft drinks enhanced with prebiotics. The products have no added sugar and several varieties contain added fruit juice. The product line is packaged in 12 ounce cans and there are currently five SKUs.

The line features a mix of classics and more adventurous flavors, including Root Beer, Ginger Beer, Cola Amaretto, Key Lime with Jalapeño and Lychee Lemonade. The products have between 21 and 42 calories per can and are sweetened with a blend of monk fruit, allulose, and erythritol and feature agave enhancer. The products also have 5 grams of fiber from added chicory root.

In terms of taste, all five flavors are enjoyable, especially for low calorie sodas. We really like the level of sweetness, which is pretty close to a full calorie soft drink and has minimal sweetener aftertaste. Of the five flavors, there were three that really stood out: Cola Amaretto, Key Lime with Jalapeño and Root Beer. 

First, the Cola Amaretto, which is basically a cola that has notes of bitters and caramel in its base flavor. It’s a nice twist that makes this product feel innovative rather than a compromised version of a full calorie offering.

Next is Key Lime with Jalapeño, which uses key lime juice and has notes of citrus, spice, and sweetness. We really like how these three flavors come together and if we’re talking about spicy SKUs, we much prefer this to the ginger beer, which felt a bit too one dimensional.  

Finally, there’s Root Beer. Now we’ve sampled a ton of reduced calorie root beers and most of them lack the creamy flavor that you’d expect from a root beer. Not this one. It’s rich and creamy and finishes with a pleasant caramel note — all while having only 23 calories and less than 1 grams of sugar.

The other two flavors, Lychee Lemonade and Ginger Beer, still need a little bit of refinement in our opinion. For the former, we’d like to see more lychee flavor so the lemon doesn’t take over as much. The Ginger Beer is dry and spicy, which we think limits the drink’s potential and should probably have a second flavor mixed in with it.

On the packaging front, Brooklyn Cannery utilizes a white shrink sleeve label with a matte finish. There’s an accent color for each flavor that is present on the front panel behind the label copy and roughly resembles a giant “B.”  There’s also a large “Brooklyn Cannery” logo that runs down the left side of the front panel (although you have to turn the can slightly to see it) while a smaller Brooklyn Cannery logo — this time a play on a can pull tab — sits above the front label copy. All the copy on the top half of the can is in a lowercase retro style font while the words “prebiotic soda” are in upper case and placed at the bottom of the front panel. All in all it’s a fine looking design that is pretty intuitive and easy to read.

Our only feedback is that we’d love the Brooklyn Cannery logo to be a bit more obvious and prominent. While the can tab logo is clever, it doesn’t get the job done at this stage where Brooklyn Cannery is a new brand and needs to build awareness. We think the current look runs the risk of being missed against more strongly branded competitors. 

In the end, Brooklyn Cannery has created some of the best tasting low calorie CSDs that we’ve tasted in a while and we love their choice of flavors.  Some refinement and strengthening of the branding would definitely help, but this is a very solid initial effort for the brand.