Sebring Soda Festival Turns Five!

The fifth anniversary edition of the Sebring Soda Festival returns bigger
and better the second weekend of April (April 7-8). What started out as a small, niche event has grown to become the largest annual festival in the Sebring area, welcoming thousands of visitors from across Florida and the United States. Held in Central Florida’s historic downtown Sebring, this year’s event will feature more than two hundred sodas to sample, a silent disco, family fun night, food trucks, craft vendors, soda inspired activities and so much more. The festival is free to attend.

Each day visitors will have the opportunity to taste a variety of sodas, be they classic colas, ginger ales, root beers, and cream sodas or more unique offerings such as Avery Monster Mucus (we’ll let you tell us how that one tastes!), Diet Manhattan Special Espresso, Jackson Hole Snake River Sasparilla, Sioux City
Birch Beer and so much more. And everyone loves to re-visit the many vintage favorites featured at the festival, such as Cheerwine, Moxie and RC Cola. All the sodas at the festival are made in small batches and come from across the U.S., including many bottled in small towns. Sodas from companies like Sprecher Brewing Co. (Glendale, WI), Fest Cola (New Orleans, LA), Boylan Bottling Co. (New York, NY), Cheerwine (Salisbury, NC) Durango Soda Co. (Durango, CO), Gene Simmons’ Money Bags Soda (Niagara Falls, NY) and others are available for tasting. Starting as low as $5, tickets are required to sample the sodas. They can be purchased online or on-site at the event.

“Everybody loves a soda,” said Casey Hartt, Lead Marketing Consultant at Visit Sebring, “but it turns out they also love a soda festival! We had no idea when we first started discussing ideas for the festival back in 2017 that it would become the award-winning success that it is today.”

Back in 2017, the original owner of the local soda shop, Sebring Soda & Ice Cream Works, reached out to the city with the idea. Jeff Cannady saw how popular the shop, and its hundreds of flavors, was with both locals and visitors. He believed that a festival celebrating all things soda-related would be a winner
– and he was right! Through lots of hard work by Visit Sebring, the Sebring Chamber of Commerce, the City of Sebring, the Soda Shop and the Sebring Community Redevelopment Agency, the first festival happened in 2018. It was so successful from the get-go, that the festival is now an annual institution in
Sebring and a second soda shop opened in nearby Lake Placid.

This year’s celebrations will kick off at 2pm on Friday with tastings, vendor booths and food trucks, along with live entertainment and kids’ activities. Saturday’s fun starts at 10am with all-day live entertainment, activities and more than 200 sodas to sample.

For more information on the Sebring Soda Festival, please contact Tanya Churchmuch at tanya@muchpr.com or Casey Hartt at Casey@visitsebring.com.