Coca‑Cola® Zero Sugar: Dog Oreo edition

coke's 2nd favorite cookie

Hello, clowns!

I don’t know if you’ve all been observing store shelves at all, but man, there are some wacky big brand collaborations out there lately. It’s clearly to get the attention of pea-brained people like me, who immediately point at the new thing saying, “I need this,” when what I really meant to say was, “Boy, I have $5.37 that’s burning a hole in my pocket that should really go towards my medical bills.”

If I don’t find out about one of these collabs on my own, people on social media always inform me about them if they reach a certain level of wackiness. This is how I found out about a pretty recent Oreo and Coca-Cola collab.

I’m specifically talking about this limited-edition Oreo-flavored Coca-Cola Zero Sugar.

“Dannis, Dannis, have you seen this?!” everyone said, tagging me in their shit. Ah yes, drinking your cookies with your Coke, the match we always needed.

This brand partnership feels like a crossbreed between two animals that shouldn’t be mixed together, like a frog and a pony. (That would make it a “frony.” Or would that be a “prog?”) So I took that doctor’s bill money, wisely invested it in a 10-pack of mini cans, and brought it home.

These mini cans are adorable, by the way. One of them is about the height of Harvey standing up.

This soda sort of tastes like Oreos, I guess. It mostly has an artificial chocolate-vanilla scent to it that likely involves compounds that you can probably find in a delicious caustic cleaning solution. It’s also very sweet in a cloying sort of way. There’s nothing like a thirst-quenching cookie!

Anyway, it’s like Davida’s new favorite soda, and no, this post isn’t sponsored, unless Davida’s been secretly accepting Big Coca-Cola Money and hasn’t been telling me. Come to think of it, I was wondering where she got that Aston Martin.

Hey Mr. Coke, if you’re listening, sponsor me! I promise I’ll stop threatening to shove every single one of your products up my ass! Just kidding, they’re already up there. I’m a legend in the emergency room.

This next part is closely related, I promise.

The other day I was out running errands at the pet store, getting what I affectionately call “poo sand” (aka kitty litter) for our two little chuckleheads, when another curious product caught my eye.

It was a package of cookies that looked suspiciously like Halloween-themed Oreos. Cookies? At Petco? Someone had to be fucking with me. I took a closer look and found out that they’re from Bootique, which is Petco’s house brand of goods for pets. These Oreos were actually supposed to be for dogs, but what I decided right there was that they were actually meant for me.

So I brought some home and tore into the package immediately.

I still can’t get over how much dog food I eat, considering that one, we don’t have a dog, and two, we’ve never owned a dog. I guess I just really feel a mental kinship with them, you know? We both like to chase squirrels and pee on things to mark our territory.

These sandwich cookies looked really nice and everything, with a bright orange filling and thick crunchy-looking wafers on either side. I sniffed one, and it even smelled good. Then I bit right in.

I can’t fucking believe I’m saying this, but this cookie was actually, genuinely, good.

In fact, it wasn’t just good, it was great. It was crisp, crumbly, very sweet, and just tasted like a regular people cookie. In fact, if you’d handed it to me with some coffee I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, and apparently, you know me too well if you’re just handing me dog food.

“Davida!” I shouted. “You need to come try this dog cookie!”

She stepped into the kitchen and took the half-eaten cookie from me and wordlessly gave it a shot. I could tell by the expression on her face that she too, was genuinely enjoying it.

“It's better than the knockoff Oreos that come in Lunchables!” she exclaimed.

Then I looked at the package’s ingredients. The cookies contained flour, sugar, soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, water, caramel coloring, baking soda — what the actual hell? These were regular cookies! That I paid, *checks receipt* $8.99 for! I didn’t know that dogs were allowed to eat that much sugar. Hell, people aren’t supposed to eat that much sugar.

These cookies were pretty good, so I thought to myself, “Dannis Ree, you’ve had the Oreo Coca-Cola Zero Sugar drink already. It’s fine. But could you infuse one of these delicious, delicious, Dog Oreos into a Coke Zero instead? Could this in fact, dethrone the leading cookie-flavored Coca-Cola product?”

Man, if this turned out well, I could convince the Coca-Cola company to turn this into a product, give me full credit, and pay me accordingly. I could finally break free from the shackles of monetary confinement! I too could have an Aston Martin like Davida!

My plan was to pulverize some Dog Oreos (this was what I was officially calling them now) and put them into a bottle of Coke Zero and let them steep like tea, in order to see if the Coke would extract the flavor from the cookies.

I went out and got some Coke Zero Sugar, and when I got back, I immediately began to chop up some cookies.

As I was blitzing the dog cookies, I thought I felt some small sandy particles pelting the top of my head.

Then I remembered that my immersion blender’s food processor attachment isn’t exactly in the best shape.

I’d cracked the housing a long time ago, and little bits of Dog Oreos had in fact been flying out of the hole on top, pinging gleefully off the top of my huge melon. That was an exhilirating experience I hope to live again someday.

I opened up a bottle of Coke Zero, drank a little bit to make room, and then used a funnel to start pouring in dog cookie bits.

I wasn’t enjoying the overall look, however, because the rapidly hydrating cookie particles were starting to look like wet dog food. Which I guess this technically was. I let the soda sit in the fridge overnight to steep and wondered if all food was technically dog food.

The next day, I pulled the drink out of the fridge and admired the fact that it now looked like raw sewage, as opposed to cooked sewage.

Most of the cookie material had settled to the bottom of the Coke Zero Sugar bottle, kinda lookin’ like that turd that someone at your office “forgot” to flush before you stepped into that stall.

When I opened the bottle up, all the cookie solids bubbled up to the top and I started crying in sheer terror.

“We’ve all been there, Dog Oreo Coke,” I said, looking off into the distance. “We’ve all been there.”

But the idea of potentially drinking the mashed up solids didn’t sound so good to me, so I decided to filter them out using a coffee filter and a funnel.

It took a while, but it worked pretty well.

Eventually the Dog Oreos clogged up the coffee filter’s ability to seep out more liquid, and the trickle tapered down to a single drop every now and then.

I’d extracted plenty of Doggie Oreo elixir at this point anyway.

The Coke Zero’s color, as you can see, had transformed from its usual opaque blackish brown into the shade of an oversteeped iced tea. I took a whiff and it also smelled suspiciously different, but it’s hard to describe just how. The Coke smelled almost as if there were toasted notes in it, and congrats, apparently now I’m a sommelier.

Despite how good the cookies were on their own, I was a little bit nervous trying this stuff.

It’s partly because the smell had thrown me off a bit. There was something odd about that scent that I didn’t like so much, but I took a sip anyway. And holy shit, it worked — the Coke Zero now tasted like those cookies! And not in a good way! The drink had taken on some strange bitter tones, and considering the cookies didn’t have chocolate in them, that seemed like a strange aftereffect.

And the soda left me with a mealy aftertaste too. I’m guessing it’s because the starches from the cookies had leached into the Coke, which at this point had gone mostly flat. Oh, and it was extra sweet, thanks to the icing in the cookies.

Davida was in the other room working on something, so I brought her the glass of Dog Oreo Coke Zero. She immediately took a sip like a champ, and then winced.

She’d agreed with my conclusion. “It only tastes like the cookie part, but extra bitter.”

Damn. My get rich quick scheme was dead in the water. I try a lot of those stunts on this newsletter, from Escargogurt to trying to invent a line of red onion-flavored hard seltzer, but othing’s worked so far. Probably because everything I make for the newsletter is, well, fucking disgusting. But you know, it only takes one big success to hit the jackpot (just ask the Baha Men), and one day I’ll be able to blow this pop stand and drive an Aston Martin like Davida does.

But I did some fact checking just now. Turns out the Aston Martin Davida rolls around in is a actually PT Cruiser, and I’ve just been diagnosed with a medical condition where I can’t tell cars apart.

So, clowns: I still have a lot of Dog Oreos leftover. Why don’t you all chime in and let me know what I should do with the rest of them? Let’s have a spirited conversation in the comments section, and how ‘bout I try cooking up one of your ideas for paid subscribers next week?

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Okay, everyone! I know the footer part’s never too exciting, but this part’s really important for the survival of the newsletter — if you liked today’s Dog Oreo shenanigans, please share this edition on social media, your website, hugely successful newsletter, or beg Taylor Swift to mention it at her next concert. It helps grow the newsletter bit by bit.

And if any of you have any bright ideas as to how to grow and promote this thing, I’m all ears. I basically just want to gross out the masses.

Finally, without paid subscriptions, I couldn’t keep this thing going, so think about upgrading your account today. I’m actually in awe of how much support I’ve had from you since day one, but it’s hard not to second guess myself sometimes. Paid subscribers get exclusive editions every other week, like next week’s new Dog Oreo edition, and full run of the 5+ years of archives.

Five years?! Jesus. I know a lot of you like to go on binge reading sprees too, which delights me to no end. Okay, here’s where I leave you for the weekend, Dog Oreo’d out. As always, I love you all (so so much), and I hope you’re all staying safe, especially those of you affected by the recent hurricanes.