Coca-Cola’s campaign for Fuze Iced Tea is relying on the sentimentality Canadians have for the iced tea recipe they grew up with.

The “Great Flavour Run” campaign for its newly unveiled 5-SKU flavour lineup takes viewers on a journey across the country, with a protagonist hastily sharing arm loads of the fruity-tea beverage, on busy streets, aboard planes and in pubs.

“At Coca-Cola, we believe in bringing people together for shared moments of joy, and in the power of nostalgia,” says Jacques Blanchet, director of integrated marketing for Coca-Cola Canada.

At the end of 2024, Coca-Cola announced that it’s no longer producing or bottling iced tea under third-party owned trademarks. Instead, its iced tea will be produced under the Fuze brand, rather than Nestea, which is now manufactured, marketed, sold, distributed and merchandized in Canada, by Keurig Dr Pepper.

Blanchet adds, however, that Fuze Iced Tea is made using the same recipe, with the same ingredients sourced from the same suppliers, at the same Canadian facilities where it has made iced tea for decades.

In the company’s February earnings call, Coca-Cola admitted that the ready-to-drink tea market is a category that “doesn’t always get a lot of attention.”

However, the company saw potential momentum in ready-to-drink teas, calling it the fastest growing category in the soft-drink industry. Coca-Cola noted that 2024 category volume growth for ready-to-drink tea was 5%.

The campaign for Fuze Iced Tea was created by WPP Open X and led by VML with buy support from EssenceMediacom.

“There’s no greater joy than sharing something you enjoy with the people you love and that’s the spirit of the campaign for Fuze we wanted to bring to life,” says Graham Lang, chief creative officer at WPP Open X, Fuze’s agency partner.

The platform’s “Great Flavour Run” hero film and supporting creative was developed by VML Canada.