Review: Mountain Dew And Trolli Join Forces To Make Wonderfully Sweet Soda And Slightly Sour Gummies

Mountain Dew has been enjoying a prolific run of new products lately, introducing Mountain Dew Baja Midnight as a Taco Bell exclusive and Mountain Dew Mango Rush just for Little Caesars. And 2025 just keeps getting more interesting for the Pepsi-made soda with the distinctive taste. Vying for shelf space with the many other Mountain Dew flavors out there comes a new variety that deliberately tastes just like candy.

Trolli is a candy company best known for its powerfully sour and brightly colored gummy products; Mountain Dew for its famously highly-caffeinated citrus blend sodas. In the summer of 2025, the two disparate sweets makers teamed up to create a soft drink that tastes like both things as well as something entirely new. That's Mountain Dew Zero Sugar x Trolli Cherry-Lemon, a beverage that carries the familiar Mountain Dew zing as well as the sour kick from Trolli gummies, along with a sweet cherry-lemon hybrid. The whole thing is made completely without any extra sugar. Meanwhile, the participants went the other way with the partnership, too, infusing Mountain Dew flavors into Trolli's Sour Brite Crawlers to create Trolli x Mountain Dew Sour Brite Crawlers. Here's everything there is to know about the new soda and the new candy, including where to buy it and how they taste.

What would happen if a bunch of Trolli candies infiltrated some Mountain Dew? That's the premise behind Mountain Dew Zero Sugar x Trolli Cherry-Lemon, a new spinoff soda that's also a brand extension of a popular line of gummies. Trolli specializes in flavor combinations that are as sweet as they are sour. The source of the unique taste of the candy company's cherry-lemon gummies has now been infused into Mountain Dew, which itself boasts a unique and familiar citrus taste. 

The resultant soda is called Mountain Dew Zero Sugar x Trolli Cherry-Lemon. It's got all the many different citrus elements of a Mountain Dew but with a bit of cherry and a wallop of lemon, too. Colored an intriguing and electric candy-apple red, it's also a rare attempt by a major soda manufacturer at a sour beverage. In a realm dictated by sweetness, it's certainly different. Mountain Dew Zero Sugar x Trolli Cherry-Lemon additionally sets itself apart from other soft drink novelties by being artificially sweetened — there's no sugar added here, giving drinkers a taste of heavily-sweetened Trolli gummy candies but without the calories or blood glucose spikes.

There's also Trolli x Mountain Dew Sour Brite Crawlers. Into four standard flavors of sweet, sour, chewy, and brightly colored gummy worms comes the unmistakable taste of Mountain Dew to blend with the flavors.

As is often the way that Mountain Dew launches a new product, the initial release of Mountain Dew Zero Sugar x Trolli Cherry-Lemon will be through a single, contracted retail partnership. When Mountain Dew Zero Sugar x Trolli Cherry-Lemon officially goes on sale on Monday, August 25, 2025, it will only be found at Walmart stores. There are more than 3,500 Walmart big box stores and nearly 700 grocery-only Walmart Neighborhood Markets across the United States, providing ample opportunities to buy the brand new candy-like but essentially sugar-free Mountain Dew.

Following its debut, spotlight rollout at Walmart, manufacturer Pepsi says that consumers should start to see Mountain Dew Zero Sugar x Trolli Cherry-Lemon in other grocery and variety retail outlets. The drink should start appearing in non-Walmart stores two weeks later, on September 8. But no matter where it's sold and when, Mountain Dew Zero Sugar x Trolli Cherry-Lemon will be produced in limited amounts, as it's only scheduled to be made and sold for a short, if indeterminate period of time. The soda is packaged in two varieties: as single-serving 20-ounce bottles, and in packs of 12 cans.

Trolli x Mountain Dew Sour Brite Crawlers began to appear in stores in mid-August, ramping up for a nationwide albeit brief release. It comes in three sizes: 4.25 ounce, 6.3 ounce, and 12.3 ounce packages.

Like the vast majority of diet or zero-sugar soft drinks, Mountain Dew Zero Sugar x Trolli Cherry-Lemon doesn't have much in the way of substantial nutritional content. One serving equals 12 ounces, or a full can of the stuff, which contains zero fat or protein, a mere pinch of sodium at 50 milligrams, and just 10 calories. Mountain Dew Zero Sugar x Trolli Cherry-Lemon indeed has zero sugar, added or otherwise, which doesn't contribute to the less than one gram of carbohydrate present.

By contrast, the other side of the high-profile collaboration, in which the flavors of the soda have been infused in the candy, is positively packed with sugar. Trolli recommends a serving as five gummy worms. Those pieces add up to 100 calories, and most of that count comes from carbohydrates. One serving has 23 total carbohydrate grams, and 14 grams of that is added sugar. There's very little sodium, at 45 milligrams, and a single gram of protein, too.

Mountain Dew Zero Sugar x Trolli Cherry-Lemon, with its impossibly bright red complexion, conveys a summery, nostalgic vibe. When poured into a glass, not only does it look like a  Kool-Aid or Hawaiian Punch, but it smells like them, too. The only difference, and bonus, is that this drink is carbonated, but only lightly, as is a hallmark of Mountain Dew.

A light twinge of bubbles on the tongue carries with it a strong flavor, reminiscent of Kool-Aid and Hawaiian Punch. At a first sip, indistinguishable artificial fruit flavors quickly give way to a decidedly cherry flavor. Sure, there's the faintest hint of lemon, or maybe just a bit of tang, but that just complements and serves the cherry. 

Overall, Mountain Dew Zero Sugar x Trolli Cherry-Lemon tastes like a more nuanced version of Mountain Dew Code Red, or a less sweet and cloying Shirley Temple that also manages to be grenadine-forward. This is a maraschino cherry syrup-flavored soda with Mountain Dew branding. Not much citrus can be detected, but that's okay, because it's one of the sweetest and most flavorful sugar-free beverages ever attempted. This liquid candy without caloric sweetener even lacks the typical aftertaste of other diet and zero-sugar beverages, eschewing that customary bitterness in favor of a sweet cherry sensation that lingers.

Each bag of Trolli x Mountain Dew Sour Brite Crawlers includes three separate flavors of color-coded candy worms. The blue is a citrus and blue raspberry blend, the red is a cherry citrus, and the green is unadulterated citrus, with the common thread there contributed by the addition of the essence of Mountain Dew. Perhaps the use of the sweet soda undercuts the innate and promised sourness in the Sour Brite Crawlers, because these aren't all that sour, overall. At first, they each provide a sweet punch of taste before they get increasingly but never excessively sour, leaving behind a playfully bitter aftertaste.

Trolli Sour Brite Crawlers, at least in this iteration, are softer and chewier than the extremely tough and aggressively gelatinous competition in the gummy sector. And after chewing and swallowing the gummy is also when the flavor is at its most prominent, confusingly. The green-colored, citrus-only worms taste the most like Mountain Dew, but a vaguely sour Mountain Dew that's also been heavily sweetened. 

While they're all objectively good in terms of sweet-sour balance and texture, the only one that reminds the eater somewhat of the Trolli/Mountain Dew collaboration in its soft drink form is the red-colored, cherry-citrus worm. It comes very close to replicating the flavor of the brand new Mountain Dew with cherry-lemon added, offering the same powerful vibes of maraschino cherries.