Dirty Soda in Provo: The Shops, the Vocabulary, and Where It Came From

JoAnn Giordano Editor-in-Chief, Provo.com

If you have just moved to Provo and noticed there are more drive-through soda windows than coffee shops, you are not imagining it and you are not seeing a novelty. You are looking at a category of business that Utah invented, that survived a trademark war, and that turned out to be far more durable than the explanation everyone gives for it.

Here is what it actually is, how to order in it, and the one practical fact about it that no other guide seems to publish.

What a dirty soda is

Start with a fountain soda — Dr Pepper, Diet Coke and Mountain Dew do most of the work. Add flavored syrups. Add a cream: coconut, half-and-half, or a sweet cream. Often add a fruit puree or a wedge of fresh lime. The result is sweeter, softer and more layered than straight soda, and it is served over a great deal of ice in a cup considerably larger than you are expecting.

The word dirty originally meant something narrower than it does now. Swig's founder has described it plainly: at Swig, dirty means coconut. In general Utah usage it has drifted to mean any soda clouded with cream, which is where the name comes from — the cream makes the drink cloudy.

The vocabulary is worth knowing before you are at a window with a queue behind you:

• Base — the soda underneath. Say it first.
• Dirty — cream added. At some shops, coconut specifically.
• Extra dirty — more cream. At Sodalicious this has meant an added shot of half-and-half.
• Refresher / flavored water — the same build with no soda and usually no cream. This is the actual answer for people who do not want the sugar of a full dirty soda, and every shop has a version.
• The named drinks — every chain has dozens, and the names are deliberately unhelpful. Sodalicious has run drinks called things like Your Mom. You are not expected to know them; ask what is in one.

Where it came from, and why that matters

Swig opened in April 2010 in St. George, in Utah's far southwest corner, founded by Nicole Tanner and her then-husband Todd Tanner, near what is now Utah Tech University. Early drinks sold for a dollar. Tanner and her team coined dirty soda when they added a Dirty Dr Pepper to the menu.

This is the detail Utah Valley usually gets wrong: the category is Utah's, but it is not ours. It arrived here from four hours south and was adopted so completely that Provo reads as its natural home.

What followed was fast. Sodalicious opened in 2013, and by the mid-2010s it had multiple locations with a Provo store among them. FiiZ started in Utah and expanded past seventy locations nationally. Quench It! carried the model outside the state. Swig, meanwhile, went from a single southern-Utah window to a chain of 164 locations as of April 2026, headquartered in Sandy, after founder Nicole Robison sold to Four Foods Group in 2017 and private-equity backer Savory Fund sold a majority stake to the Larry H. Miller Company in November 2022.

The trademark war that shaped the menus

In 2013 Swig trademarked the term in connection with fountain drinks, and in 2015 it sued Sodalicious for using the word dirty. Sodalicious counter-sued to have the trademark canceled, arguing that dirty was a generic descriptor for a drink with something added — its lawyers pointed at the dirty martini. A federal magistrate declined to dismiss the case, and the two sides settled in 2017 on undisclosed terms.

Nobody won a public victory, but the fight left a visible mark, and you can check it yourself in about ninety seconds. A number of Utah soda shops stopped using the word dirty on their menu boards. They describe cream-added drinks some other way. That is not a coincidence of branding; it is what a live trademark dispute does to an industry of small operators who cannot afford one. The next time you are at a window, read the board and notice which word is missing.

The explanation everyone gives, and the part it gets wrong

The standard account is that soda shops exist because members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints avoid coffee, so this is where the social drink ritual went instead. Broadly, yes. The Word of Wisdom, the health code in Doctrine and Covenants 89, addresses alcohol, tobacco and "hot drinks," which Church leaders have taught refers to tea and coffee.

But the popular version of this story adds something the text does not say. The Word of Wisdom does not mention caffeine, and in August 2012 the Church stated publicly that it does not prohibit caffeine.

The clearest local test of what soda shops are really selling came five years later. BYU had not sold caffeinated soft drinks on campus since the mid-1950s — and that ban was a decision made by the director of BYU Food Services, not a religious rule, a distinction almost every national article about it got wrong. On 21 September 2017, BYU reversed it, announcing the change with a photo of a Coke can and two words: It's happening. Campus dining said consumer preferences had changed. The university also said it would still not sell energy drinks.

If the soda shops existed because students could not buy caffeine, that day should have hurt them.

It did not. Three weeks later BYU's own student newspaper ran the follow-up under a headline saying that caffeine sold on campus was minimally affecting local soda businesses. Students kept going to Swig.

That is the finding, and it reframes the whole category. The product was never the caffeine. It is the customization, the drive-through, the ninety-second stop between classes, and a place to meet someone that costs a few dollars and closes early. Provo would have invented this even if the vending machines had been full the whole time.

The shops

Utah Valley's soda scene is chain-dominated, which is unusual for anything else we cover and is simply the truth here. What varies is not the concept but the syrup range, the cookie program and — crucially — the hours.

Swig. The original. Drive-through-led, with a cookie program that is a real part of the business rather than an afterthought, plus pretzel bites. In Provo it operates at 66 E University Parkway and 1523 N Canyon Road, with 106 N State Street in Orem and 1795 W 500 S in Springville nearby.

Sodalicious. Swig's earliest serious competitor and the other half of the lawsuit. Larger custom range, more sit-down space at some stores, strong cookies. In Provo: 30 W 300 North and 3376 N University Avenue.

FiiZ Drinks. Utah-founded and now national, with a broader non-soda menu — blended drinks, energy combinations and refreshers. Locally, 1120 W Center Street, Orem.

Twisted Sugar. The cookie-forward version of the model; the drinks are good and the cookies are the reason people drive there. 2245 N University Parkway, Provo.

Quench It! is the other name you will hear, and it is one of the chains credited with taking the format beyond Utah.

One correction to this page. An earlier version of this guide listed a shaved-ice chain among Utah Valley's energy-drink shops. That was wrong and the claim has been removed rather than replaced with a corrected roster: several soda shops sell energy-drink builds, and the specialist energy-drink shops in this valley open and close fast enough that we are not naming a list we cannot keep current.

The Sunday rule, which is not a rule

Here is the practical fact this page exists to deliver, and it is the one that surprises people who have lived here for years.

Sunday closure is decided store by store, not brand by brand.

Hours checked in August 2026:

Read the Swig rows again. The same brand is open on Sunday afternoon at three Utah Valley locations and closed at a fourth about ten miles down the freeway. Whatever you have been told about "Swig is open Sundays" or "the soda places are all closed Sundays," neither is true as a general statement, and the assumption is how people end up in an empty parking lot.

Two caveats that matter more here than usual. Posted hours drift — one Provo location has drawn complaints for showing a closing time online half an hour later than the one on its own door. And Sunday hours in this valley change seasonally and by staffing. Treat the table above as a demonstration that the answer varies, not as a schedule. Our guide to what is actually open on Sunday in Provo covers the wider pattern and why it exists.

The cookie half of the business

It is easy to miss that these are not really soda shops. They are two businesses sharing a window, and the second one is baked goods.

Swig's frosted sugar cookie is a genuine draw rather than an upsell, and the chain has expanded the food side to pretzel bites and other snacks. Twisted Sugar is the clearest expression of the model: the drinks are good, the cookies are the reason people plan a trip, and the store takes large catering orders. Sodalicious cookies have their own defenders, some of whom will tell you unprompted that they prefer them to the better-known cookie chains.

That overlap matters if you are ordering for a group. A soda shop will make twenty custom drinks faster than any coffee shop in the valley, and several will do cookies by the dozen with notice — which is why these places quietly run a large share of the ward activities, office birthdays and study-group deliveries in Utah County. If you are planning around a cookie order rather than a drink order, our guide to Crumbl and the Utah cookie business covers that side properly, including the part locals most often get wrong about where Crumbl started.

How it went national

For most of the 2010s, dirty soda was invisible outside Utah. That changed in the early 2020s, largely through social media, and the change came from two directions at once.

The Utah chains went out. FiiZ, founded in Utah, expanded past seventy locations across multiple states. Quench It! is one of the chains credited with carrying the drive-through soda model beyond Utah's borders. Swig went from a single window in St. George to a chain of well over a hundred and fifty locations under national ownership.

And the national brands came in. Once the format had a name and an audience, larger companies produced their own versions and tie-ins — including national drive-in chains adding cream-and-syrup soda builds to their menus, coffee-creamer brands marketing directly to the use case, and Swig itself running limited-edition collaborations with national candy brands.

The result is that a Provo teenager's after-school habit became a category with a marketing budget. What has not changed is the density. Utah Valley still has more of these per capita than anywhere else, and the drive-through soda window here is ordinary infrastructure rather than a destination — which is exactly why it is worth understanding if you have just moved in.

If you do not drink soda

This is a real problem for newcomers, because in Utah Valley the soda shop is frequently the venue rather than the drink. You will be invited to one.

You are not stuck. Every chain here makes fruit refreshers and flavored waters built on sparkling or still water instead of soda, with the same syrups and purees, and they are treated as a normal order rather than an accommodation. Most also carry lemonades and, at some locations, blended and frozen drinks. If you want no sugar at all, ask what sugar-free syrups they stock — the range is thinner than regular customers assume, and it is a fair criticism of the category that it has been slow to fix.

One timing note: these are drive-through-first businesses, and the lane is genuinely the fastest route at quiet hours and genuinely the slowest at 3pm on a school day and after evening church activities. If a line is wrapped around the building, the walk-up counter is usually empty.

How to order like you have done this before

1. Name the size first, and go smaller than you think. These cups run large, and a large dirty soda is a lot of sugar.
2. Name the base. Dr Pepper, Diet Coke, Sprite, Mountain Dew.
3. Say dirty, or name the cream. Coconut is the classic. Half-and-half is richer and rounder.
4. Add one syrup, not four. The menu drinks stack several; a first-timer stacking three syrups plus cream usually cannot taste any of them.
5. Ask what is in the special. Nobody expects you to decode a drink called Your Mom.
6. If you do not want the sugar, order the refresher version. Same shop, same speed, no cream.

Where this sits in the rest of the valley's drink scene

Provo does have real coffee, and it is better than outsiders assume — see coffee shops in Provo and Orem. The cookie side of the soda business overlaps heavily with the bakery and dessert scene. And if you want the longer story of how the valley's eating and drinking habits got this way, the history of Provo's food scene covers it.

Students should also know that soda shops are one of the most consistently discounted categories locally; our student discounts guide covers where those actually apply.

Related guides

• Best Coffee & Cafe Spots in Provo & Orem
• Best Desserts & Bakeries
• What's Open on Sunday in Provo
• The History of Provo's Food Scene
• Student Discounts & Deals

Last updated: August 2026. Locations and Sunday hours were checked in August 2026 and change without notice. No prices are quoted here; drink pricing in this category moves faster than any guide can track.

JoAnn Giordano

Editor-in-Chief

JoAnn Giordano is the editor-in-chief of Provo.com. Having lived in and around Utah Valley for years, she leads the site's editorial direction with a focus on the comprehensive, honest local coverage that helps residents, students, and newcomers feel at home. When she's not shaping Provo.com's restaurant and neighborhood coverage, she's exploring the valley's trails and tracking down the best new spots on Center Street.