By: Wade Ellett
Photos: Bailey Sadowsky
Origional story from the April Edition of Elevate Magazine
Sidni Hood is parked in pink, pouring happiness and most importantly, she’s glad you’re here
The first thing you’ll notice about The Soda Bar is the color.
Not the menu, or even the trailer itself. The color.
Bright pink, impossible to miss amid neutral storefronts and practical midwestern palettes, The Soda Bar doesn’t look like a typical business. It looks like a vibe. Like a mood. Like someone pulled up in a spring sunrise, parked it on the curb and started serving flavored Red Bull infusions out the window with a side order of cheer.
That’s just how Sidni likes it.
“One thing that really grinds my gears is how everything is just grayscale now,” she said with a laugh. “It’s like all the colors are being drained from society.” Luckily, she’s doing something about it.
Sidni has lived in Rapid City nearly her entire life, after moving from Illinois when she was three years old. She grew up here, attending Stevens High School before transferring her junior year. Eventually she ended up reconnecting with Trae Hood, a boy she played soccer with as a kid.
“We really did not like each other,” she said emphatically. “We would always be pushing and shoving each other on the field.”
Now, the two have been a couple for a decade and are raising two young boys while juggling careers, family life and business ownership
“My husband’s in law enforcement, he’s a police officer and he’s also in the National Guard. And now I just do The Soda Bar full time,” Sidni explained. It’s a life she loves, but she’ll be the first to explain that the road to pink trailers and dirty sodas wasn’t a straight path.
After high school, she pursued nursing but decided it wasn’t the right fit for her. She later worked at the Pennington County Jail as a booking technician alongside her husband before becoming a 911 dispatcher, a job she still speaks about with deep emotion.
“It was the most fulfilling job I’ve ever had in my life,” she said. “I woke up every day excited to go to work.” It was also a job that carried a lot of weight, and remembering those calls, voices and names continues to be an influence to this day. After having children, she transitioned into a more traditional office job, though in hindsight she admits it wasn’t quite right for her. She started a small business doing laser engraving as a creative outlet, which she enjoyed, but something still seemed to be missing.
Then came a blessing in disguise. In March 2025, she was fired from her office. It happened while her husband was away for National Guard training. The next day, her laser engraver died. “Within the same week, I lost both of them,” Sidni said. “I was kind of lost. I got really sad. I didn’t know what to do.”
It didn’t take long for Sidni to find her way. In fact, the idea of creating a new business was already in the air for the Hoods. She had just one condition. “I knew whatever we did, it needed to be original in Rapid City,” she said. “I wanted to do something that nobody else was doing here.”
In less than a week, she had the idea of bringing dirty sodas to the Black Hills area.
Inspired partly by the Utah soda culture featured in the reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Sidni was fascinated by the dirty soda trend that was booming in other locales. The idea is simple: customizable sodas, lemonades and energy drink infusions mixed with flavored syrups, creams and fruit flavors. Within that simplicity, however, Sidni imagined countless possibilities for fun, tasty drinks.
The result became The Soda Bar, South Dakota’s first mobile dirty soda trailer, proving Rapid City has room for all kinds of bright ideas.
Today, The Soda Bar serves dozens of customizable drink combinations, monthly specialty menus and themed creations like “Spooky Sips” during Halloween and “Whoville Sips” during Christmas events. Sidni enjoys staying creative and is constantly experimenting with new flavors. She even invites followers to submit ideas through her TikTok series “Sips with Sidni,” where she tests new drink combinations to determine whether customers should be “sipping or skipping.”
The dirty sodas are delicious, but The Soda Bar’s popularity goes beyond tasty, creative beverages. For Sidni, the business is rooted in something more valuable than soda; community and connection.
“I don’t look at people as customers,” she said. “I look at them as my besties. They’re my friends, even if they don’t know it yet.”
It’s a philosophy that’s embedded in every aspect of the business, from the fun social media posts, to the intentional cheerfulness of the bright pink trailer, and it even includes the simple phrase printed on the back of every cup: “We’re so glad that you’re here.”
For Sidni, that isn’t marketing. It’s meaning. “I’ve lost a lot of friends to suicide,” she said quietly. “I just want everyone to remember that I’m happy that you woke up today, and I’m happy that you’re here.”
For someone who has seen some tough times of her own, and who carries memories from her days answering 911 calls, The Soda Bar, in many ways, is Sidni’s bright pink response to the blues. It’s a cheerful rebellion against gloom, a rolling reminder that small joys are worthwhile. “I want people to feel happy when they approach my trailer,” she said. “I just want to be the little bright spot in someone’s day.”
Operating a mobile business in Rapid City has also given Sidni a front-row seat to the city’s small business community. Early on, she worried that the community might not embrace a new concept like dirty sodas, but she said local support became one of the biggest reasons The Soda Bar succeeded.
“My experience has been that every business was willing to support another small business,” she said. “Everyone was reaching out to me saying, ‘Hey, we have this space available. Feel free to set up.’”
That network extends throughout the city’s growing food truck scene, which Sidni says now includes more than 100 food trucks throughout the Black Hills region. “There’s a lot of support that small businesses have in Rapid City, and we’re all just kind of leaning on each other,” she said.
And somewhere in the middle of all that support, flavored syrups and stacks of 20,000 cheerful cups, Sidni found exactly what she was looking for.
“This was just a little pink dream of mine,” she said laughing. “And now my future is bright.”
