Mountain Dew Is Selling Cans for 5 Cents to Celebrate Its 1948 Origins
Mountain Dew is going back to its roots — all the way back to 1948.
The brand is releasing 1,948 limited-edition bundles on TikTok Shop starting June 29, each including a commemorative can priced at just five cents plus a 10-pack of Mountain Dew minis. The number of bundles matches the year the drink was created by two brothers in the hills of Tennessee, and the campaign is capped at one bundle per person.
Daily quantities will be announced on Mountain Dew's Instagram Stories at noon ET each day across the three-day drop, so you'll need to be watching at the right time. The bundles are part of the brand's "American Original — Tasting Great Since '48" campaign celebrating what Mountain Dew calls "the grit and independence that trace back to the brand's Tennessee roots."
With only 1,948 bundles total across three days, these will go fast.
The Nostalgia Pricing Trend Hitting Beverages This Summer
Mountain Dew isn't alone in leaning into throwback pricing as a summer marketing move. Dairy Queen ran a similar campaign earlier this month, offering its lemonade "at lemonade stand prices" — 50 cents for a medium DQ Cooler or DQ Sparkler for DQ Rewards members through the app from June 15 to 21. The chain even converted its Point Pleasant, New Jersey location into an actual lemonade stand for a day to drive the point home.
It's a smart play and the psychology behind it is worth understanding. Nostalgia pricing — offering a product at what it cost decades ago — generates social media buzz that paid advertising struggles to match. A five-cent soda is inherently shareable. People post it, talk about it, screenshot it. The actual financial cost to the brand is negligible across 1,948 units. The marketing value is significantly larger.
Mountain Dew's Origin Story
The brand's Tennessee roots aren't just marketing copy. Mountain Dew was created in 1948 by brothers Barney and Ally Hartman in Johnson City, Tennessee, originally as a mixer for whiskey when other sodas were hard to come by in the region. The name came from Appalachian slang for moonshine. Early bottles even featured a cartoon hillbilly character.
The Hartman brothers sold the brand to Pepsi-Cola in 1964, which is when it went fully national. Over the decades it evolved from a regional novelty into one of the best-selling sodas in the United States — currently the third most popular carbonated soft drink in the country behind Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Its fanbase, sometimes called the "Dew Nation," is notably intense and loyal in ways that most beverage brands can only aspire to.
The five-cent price point nods to what a soda actually cost in the late 1940s — a bottle of Coke or a comparable soft drink typically ran a nickel at the time, a price that held relatively stable for decades due to the company's contractual relationships with bottlers. Adjusted for inflation, a 1948 nickel is worth roughly 65 cents today. So this isn't just nostalgia — it's actually a better deal in real terms than what people were paying when Mountain Dew was born.
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