Have you ever been sipping a crisp, ice-cold Coke and thought: “Gee. You know what this needs? Oreos!”

What is wrong with you? I mean, hey. I’ve been known to eat an Oreo from time to time, and I am a sucker for a Coke Zero, but I’ve never found my Oreos lacking in Coca-Cola brand flavor, or vice versa. But! If YOU have this problem (no judgment…), I have just the slew of products for you! Since Aug. 13 (Friday the 13th, hilariously), Coca-Cola and Oreo have been running their “Besties” promotion: a collaboration between both brands to bring products bearing each other’s signature flavors and “experiences” to you, the consumer. Yippee. This collaboration features two flagship, limited-time products: Oreo-Flavored Coca-Cola Zero, and Coca-Cola flavored Oreos, featuring “popping candy.” And now, I risk my future prospects to embolden you, the consumer, to know better than to buy this stuff. Away we go…

Coca-Cola Flavored Oreos, with Popping Candy

Intellectual property is so funny. If they called these weird candies Pop Rocks, some CEO would get sued for more money than I’ve ever made in my entire life. That’s just sort of a silly aside, sorry–let’s critique these cookies. 

They LOOK kind of cool, honestly. They’re doing this sort of asymmetry thing, where one cookie in the Oreo is the typical color and patterning, while the other is bright red, with a print of two Coke bottles clinking together and bubbling. Cute, kitsch, I get what they were going for. On the flavor front, though? I don’t know. The colors of the cookies aren’t just aesthetic, as they’re both flavored differently–with the red cookie boasting a kinda sorta Coke taste, and the brown being the default flavor. The Coke flavoring, if I closed my eyes and didn’t think about it, just struck me as sort of citrus-y. I feel like a lot of the flavor of a Coke is lost when you consume it in room temperature cookie form. The filling itself is typical, but the popping candies buried within it are pretty convincingly flavored with Coca-Cola. The candies DO pop, which I imagine is to simulate the carbonation of a soda, but in practice they bring a sort of grit to the eating experience that I found really unappetizing. It was like I was eating vaguely-lemon flavored Oreos at the beach and a little sand got on them. Not amazing. I wish these just had two Coke-flavored cookies, instead of one chocolate and one soda. The earthiness of dutch chocolate just doesn’t mesh well with the citrusy, caremelly notes of a Coca-Cola.

Oreo Flavored Coca-Cola Zero

You want a fun non-alcoholic drinking game? Take a swig every time I use a dash in this article. 

This really doesn’t work for me. This soda reminds me a lot of Coke’s “Vanilla” flavor (which I already hate, sorry), with a sort of faux-chocolate weirdness on top.f you’ve ever had a Tootsie Roll, or a Yoo-hoo, it’s a lot like that. Just the faintest hint of ersatz chocolate. I also get a heavy hit of that diet soda funk when drinking this, which is especially odd considering I do *not* get that when I drink regular Coke Zero. Yuck. I will note for the soda connoisseurs out there that I drank this product out of a bottle, whereas much of the marketing features a fancy, speciality can. Maybe there’s something weird with the plastic that makes this taste worse. Or maybe it’s really just that bad and weird. The cookies had a sort of novelty and “fun factor” that this just really lacks, while still suffering from the same core problem of incompatible flavors being mashed together into some mad scientist concoction. Did I mention it’s painfully sweet, despite featuring zero sugar? I consider myself a diet soda agnostic most days, but this drink is giving me the sort of paranoia that makes me worry that I’m going to be a class action lawsuit beneficiary in the next 20 years because I accidentally drank enough sugar-replacing chemicals to kill a horse.

All in all, this promotion strikes me as profoundly bizarre and off-putting. Maybe it’s just my… political sensibilities, but there’s so much corporate newspeak and hollow advertising surrounding this whole event that I struggled to maintain an appetite throughout my taste test. I would not recommend these products. The merch DOES look kind of cool, though…