Coke? Nah. Sprite? Forget about it. A&W Root Beer? Not all that interesting.

But Jarritos? Pakola? Thums Up? The carbonated prides of Mexico, Pakistan and India, respectively? With their funky color schemes and the foreign lettering on their labels, they're hard to resist.

To me, each is a find — something that requires a second look during my scans of refrigerator cases in ethnic grocery stores or corner markets. It's a natural impulse: A bottle catches my eye, and I grab it as if someone behind me is waiting to take it.

Foreign sodas are, really, part of the American immigration process, arriving with or closely after an ethnic group comes to the United States. To these consumers, a soda is a brand they can identify, the way Americans do around the world with Coca-Cola.

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BRAND DIVERSITY

Foreign sodas play a minuscule role in the multibillion-dollar U.S. soda scene. But they appeal to adventurous American consumers looking for new flavors and new products. Some beers have made a similar market splash in this country: Think Corona or Heineken.

Jarritos, a line of Mexican sodas, has done well in the United States. It comes in familiar flavors like orange or lime, but also to more obscure tastes such as tamarind or jamaica (pronounced ha-my-ca), maroon hibiscus flowers. The bottled soda blankets the country, most ubiquitously in neighborhoods where Latin Americans have settled.

"One of the general movements we are seeing in the United State today is cultural fusion," said Valeria Piaggio, a vice president and marketing expert for Iconoculture, a trend research firm in Minneapolis. Foreign sodas, she says, encourage the "expansion of the American palate."

"They do two things," Piaggio says. "They appeal to the nostalgia of Latino immigrants and the desire for discovery and experimentation of the general-market consumer."

New Jersey-based Best Foods, the distributor of Pakola in 19 states, has watched demand grow from 2,300 cases annually five years ago to 12,000 today, company President Abdul Paracha says.

Pakola is still only a small part of Paracha's importing business. He's trying to change that. His children like its "green ice cream" flavor, so he sent a case when his son left for college in Boston.

The soda was shared. Others liked it.

"Whenever I go now, I try to take with me a few cases," Paracha says. "They ask for it."

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TASTE TEST

Here are three sodas I recently scored:

•VIMTO. Developed in England in 1908 as syrup to be mixed with water, it was first bottled and canned about 60 years later. It has a sparkling, ruby red color with the taste of homemade cherry Coke. It comes in a 1950s looking orange-red can with Vimto emblazoned on the side.

•FAYROUZ. Made in Egypt, now owned by Heineken. This line of sparkling malt beverages comes in a number of fruit flavors. Pear seems the most obscure; it tastes nothing like the fruit. Its light color resembles a pilsner beer. Flavor is malty with a touch of sweetness and leaves a very unpleasant aftertaste. Since alcohol is illegal or frowned upon in Muslim countries, Fayrouz was invented to be an alternative.

•PAKOLA. The ice-cream soda is neon green; other flavor include raspberry and lychee. The green tastes like vanilla with a subtle flavor of licorice and coats the mouth with sweetness and smells like Indian spice.

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asap contributor Pervaiz Shallwani is a writer based in New York.

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