At the end of January, Coca-Cola Australia set up their summer ‘Make It Yours’ campaign in the central forecourt of Westfield Parramatta for shoppers to personalise their drinks with fresh fruity ingredients.

The free drinks are ordered via a touchscreen with the option of choosing from a range of recipes created by Coca-Cola or picking the ingredients to create your own.

This Midnight Sun Coke is a berry-filled drink created by Coca-Cola and inspired by long, sunny Scandinavian summer days. It’s made by crushing 10 blueberries and 10 raspberries, adding the juice of half a lemon, topping up with ice and Coke and finished with mint leaves.

The cola flavour was rather lost in this recipe, tasting much like sweetened water at the top without much cola flavour at all until we reach the fruity acidity of the berries at the base. Whether it’s because the cola was made from a premix (like the ones at fast food restaurants that mix syrup and water as it comes out of the nozzle), the cola takes a back seat in this drink, adding only sweetness without flavour. Indeed, this drink showed us that cola is not a required base for a fruity berry drink, so if this campaign was to encourage people to buy more Coca-Cola products, it failed to recruit us.

D personalised his drink with raspberries and passionfruit (no photo), and it would seem they take less care in creating those drinks. While the drink was fruity, but it tasted very watered down on top of the half-filled cup.

Coca-Cola Midnight Sun featured at Coca-Cola Australia’s Make It Yours Campaign in Westfield Parramatta, 159-175 Church St, Parramatta NSW 2150 during January 2019.