‘90s Lunchbox Staple: Sunny Delight

In the school cafeteria, if you were a kid who brought a sack lunch rather than getting the hot lunch provided by the school, then what your lunch consisted of was super important. Just like your clothes could make a statement, what you had in your lunchbox could make or break your social status. Maybe you had some Gushers or Dunkaroos to trade, or maybe you lorded your Lunchables over your friends (click those products to read our articles on those). But just as important as the food itself was the drink that went with it. While we’ve talked about Capri-Sun and Clearly Canadian in the past (those are links too!), today it’s time to revisit another coveted lunch classic: Sunny Delight, aka SunnyD.

Though Sunny Delight was massively popular in the ‘90s, it actually was invented back in 1963 by a couple of Florida dads named Howard Dick and Phil Grinnell. The story goes that they were standing in an orange grove, and said to each other, “good, but we can do better.” Who knows if that’s really true, but nonetheless, they worked together to create a new tangy orange drink that would become Sunny Delight. The brand changed hands quite a few times over the years, but in 1989, it was bought by Procter and Gamble, who proceeded to start expanding the brand into other countries in the ‘90s.

One country where the tangy delight really caught on was in the UK. Launched in the United Kingdom with a £10 million pound promotional campaign (that would’ve been about $16.1 million in US dollars), Sunny Delight quickly caught on with the youths of the country. You can check out some samples of the commercials (aka adverts) below — they were so successful that kids were begging their parents for the spiffy individual-sized SunnyD drinks to go into their lunch packs. Within months, Sunny Delight had become the third-biggest selling soft drink in the UK, behind only Coke and Pepsi, with sales of £160 million a year. But wait, you say, soft drink? As in, soda? Wasn’t SunnyD a healthy “juice”? Um, no. No, it was not.

The original Sunny Delight only contained about 5% of actual fruit juice, though the marketing would have you believe it was mostly juice. In reality, it was really a bunch of sugar water with some flavorings and beta-carotene added for that yellow-orange color. Indeed, the Food Commission, an independent consumer organization, found that the drink was basically equivalent to a Coca-Cola type product. Consumers started to lose faith in their kids’ favorite drink, which was only exacerbated in 1999 when their use of beta-carotene also started to cause problems when reports surfaced of a 4-year-old Welsh girl’s skin turning yellow after drinking too much SunnyD. The picture below isn’t of the Welsh girl’s hands, but shows a bit of how it can change your skin color.

Now, to be fair, this girl was drinking about 1.5 liters (nearly 6.5 cups) of SunnyD a day which, let’s be honest, is too much, and too much of anything is usually bad. That volume of guzzling combined with her small size caused her to develop carotenosis, the yellowing of the skin, which can also happen if you eat too much foods with beta carotene such as carrots, sweet potatoes, or pumpkin. Basically overdosing on anything with a lot of natural orange pigment can cause the skin of your face and hands to turn yellow. When news of the Welsh girl broke, parents freaked out. Sunny Delight can make my kid turn yellow?! No thank you! Sales started to suffer, but maybe if the company had really gone out in front of it and did some damage control they could’ve fixed things. Alas, they did not.

Around the same time, the advertising agency who was responsible for developing marketing plans for SunnyD was airing a commercial featuring two white snowmen that turned yellow after raiding a refrigerator for some Sunny Delight. It’s true. Sadly, we have to admit that we can’t find a copy of it anywhere to show you other than the picture above. Suffice to say, though, things started to go downhill for the drink. An attempt at reinvention happened in 2003 when the company changed the name officially to SunnyD and updated the ingredients to actually be about 70% fruit juice, but sales didn’t recover, and by 2005 Procter and Gamble had sold off SunnyD.

That said, the drink is still around today after some more reinventions (it now only has 2% concentrated fruit juice — yep, even less than the 5% of the original recipe!). You can find it in your local grocery, or even on Amazon if you prefer online shopping. While you may be able to load up on Vitamin C with one serving of the newest iteration of SunnyD’s “Tangy Original,” you’ll also be downing a whopping 14g of sugar per serving (that’s 3.5 teaspoons of sugar!). But, it might be worth it to remember those ‘90s days of bringing out your own individual bottle of Sunny Delight at the school cafeteria to make your friends jealous.

But what about you? Were you a Sunny Delight fan? Did you ever drink so much that you turned yellow? Let us know in the comments, but first get another dose of nostalgia with this 1996 commercial featuring Seann William Scott before his breakout role as Stifler in American Pie:

Every 100ml of Sunny Delight contained about 120 micrograms of Beta carotene, which is about 15% of the recommended daily intake for an adult. The 1.5 liters of Sunny Delight the girl in Wales drank would have amounted to more than 2.25 times the daily adult intake of beta carotene, so it’s no wonder she turned yellow.
Though carotenosis, or the yellowing of the skin from beta carotene, is pretty much harmless and will go away over time, other side effects include stomach aches and flatulence. Were SunnyD farts ever a thing? You gotta wonder.
Originally, there was just one flavor of Sunny Delight, but these days there are 10 different flavors — Tangy Original, Smooth Orange, Orange Strawberry, Orange Mango, Orange Peach, Mango, Orange Pineapple, Fruit Punch, Blue Raspberry, and Lemonade.
If you want to get creative with your SunnyD, the official website even gives you some recipe ideas to utilize the different flavors, including Pineapple Upside Down Cake, Orange Cream Freezer Pops, SunnyD “Famous” Wings, and Mango Shrimp Skewers, to name a few.
The current producer of SunnyD, Sunny Delight Beverages Company, is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio and aside from SunnyD, also makes Elations glucosamine and chondroitin dietary supplements, Fruit2O flavored waters, and Veryfine juices.

Every 100ml of Sunny Delight contained about 120 micrograms of Beta carotene, which is about 15% of the recommended daily intake for an adult. The 1.5 liters of Sunny Delight the girl in Wales drank would have amounted to more than 2.25 times the daily adult intake of beta carotene, so it’s no wonder she turned yellow.
Though carotenosis, or the yellowing of the skin from beta carotene, is pretty much harmless and will go away over time, other side effects include stomach aches and flatulence. Were SunnyD farts ever a thing? You gotta wonder.
Originally, there was just one flavor of Sunny Delight, but these days there are 10 different flavors — Tangy Original, Smooth Orange, Orange Strawberry, Orange Mango, Orange Peach, Mango, Orange Pineapple, Fruit Punch, Blue Raspberry, and Lemonade.
If you want to get creative with your SunnyD, the official website even gives you some recipe ideas to utilize the different flavors, including Pineapple Upside Down Cake, Orange Cream Freezer Pops, SunnyD “Famous” Wings, and Mango Shrimp Skewers, to name a few.
The current producer of SunnyD, Sunny Delight Beverages Company, is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio and aside from SunnyD, also makes Elations glucosamine and chondroitin dietary supplements, Fruit2O flavored waters, and Veryfine juices.