Crucially, having a soft drink is the equivalent of stepping outside for a few minutes for a smoke break. It’s an excuse to “take a moment,” Reno said.
Reno’s video in the park has been viewed more than 3 million times and received almost 300,000 likes, with many people commenting on how accurate that term is. It has inspired others to use the expression, capturing not just a shift in perception of soda and cigarettes but also a collective search for a breather, as Casey Lewis, founder and writer of internet-culture newsletter After School, described it.
Or, as some social media users have put it: something to take the edge off.
Reframing the simple act of drinking a soft drink as an escape echoes many trends of the last few years in which Gen Z and younger millennials latched on to slices of pleasure to cope with political, economic and social pressures, Lewis said. There was #floortime, the “little treats” trend and the romanticisation of mundane details of life.
In 2023, headlines suggested that Gen Z was taking Diet Coke breaks during work instead of cigarette breaks. Now, that same idea of walking away from work for a few minutes – a concept so outlandish in capitalist America that surveys and research have tried to quantify the hours of missed productivity in smoke breaks – has been named.
“When I was young and working in an office, I didn’t smoke, but then I didn’t take any breaks, and I don’t think I am alone in that,” Lewis said. “But Gen Z are more likely to value their work-life balance and believe that an afternoon break is something they deserve.”
What makes the term “fridge cigarette” sticky is that it also coincides with a cultural resurgence of smoking in pop songs, movies and TV shows and with an embrace of old-fashioned sodas, said Andrea Hernandez, founder and writer of Snaxshot, a newsletter about food and beverage trends. She said vices like that had been rejected by millennials in their obsession with health and wellness but had slowly made their way back.
“I like to say it’s the ‘better for you’ chasm,” Hernandez said. There has been an influx of so-called better-for-you products, she said, like sodas infused with probiotics and protein-rich snacks marketed to the health-conscious millennial. For Gen Z consumers, the mentality is more “Oh, aspartame, it’s really bad for you, and I really don’t care,” she said. “It’s a little bit rebellious, almost nihilistic in a sense.”
And, Hernandez said, calling a Diet Coke a “fridge cig” simply makes it sound more fancy. “I’m not surprised that this came up now, during summer, where you start to fantasise, like, ‘Oh, I wish I was in Europe, but I can’t afford it.’”
In a follow-up video, Reno took the fridge cigarette analogy further. Cans of Diet Coke, she said, are like Parliament cigarettes, whereas regular Coke gives off Marlboro Red energy. Regular Coke in a glass bottle, though? That’s a cigar, the ultimate vice.
“When you see that bottle,” she said, “it’s like, ‘Oh, this is an event.’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alisha Haridasani Gupta
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
