The 90s drink Orbitz was invented in Vancouver in 1997 and was produced by the same company that made Clearly Canadian, another very-90s beverage that also came in an oddly shaped bottle.
If you’re not familiar, Orbitz was super sweet, it wasn’t carbonated, and it had little, edible, gelatinous balls that stayed impossibly suspended in it no matter what you did to it.
It looked like a weird science experiment, and to make it even more sciencey it was marketed as a "texturally enhanced alternative beverage."
Other brands were doing zany stuff to market their unique products at this time, but this one took the cake. It was one of the biggest gimmicks in the history of packaged beverages in the world, not just in BC.
The secret to the floating balls was an ingredient called gellan gum, which was first approved as a food additive in Japan in 1988. Canada followed suit in the early 90s.
It’s now used as a thickener and stabilizer in many of the foods we eat. Sauces, jams, salad dressing, and vegan gummy bears, just to name a few. I don’t know any that have it suspended in the product like Orbitz did though. It’s pretty much an invisible ingredient.
Orbitz was far from invisible in the late 90s. It was a massive novelty beverage that everybody wanted to try. But that novelty wore off faster than most people remember - to many of us it feels like this drink was around for our entire childhoods, but it was only in production for about a year, from 1997 til 1998.
The only place you’ll find it these days is in antique shops, and on Facebook Marketplace.
This story first appeared in Issue 1 of my Now You Know BC Almanac, which is now SOLD OUT. You can subscribe and receive the next issue in October, then one every 6 months after that.
