Sugar and Spice
Oct. 1st, 2002 07:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beetigerWhat better way to distract myself from once again complaining about the fact that all the jobs for food product developers are in South Jersey, Cincinnati, or at Pepsi than by doing some product reviews!
Pirate's Booty with Caramel : A
Robert's American Gourmet, the makers of the all natural upscale cheez doodles called Pirate's Booty, the dredged up from the bottom of the sea version called Veggie Booty, and the strange peace-love-and-flower-extract Personality Puffs, has launched a sweet product. It's basically their corn and rice extruded mix, flavored with a light caramel coating, like caramel corn. There's enough coating to give a satisfying crunch, but it isn't overly sweet. Both the corn and rice flavors are clear under the sweetness. In the family of snack foods, this snack is the hippie cousin of Captain Crunch, Cracker Jack, and Sugar Corn Pops. I can only hope that they have enough success to produce single serving bags of this one. I found it very addictive, and ate about 2 of the 5 servings in the bag on the 10-minute car ride between the grocery store and my house.
Ore-Ida Funky Fries, Cinna-Stiks cinnamon and sugar potatoes: D
I was very dubious about this product concept. Do we really need to entice our children to eat products like french fries by putting sugar on them? Then again, I was put in mind of foods like the Mexican sopapillas or at least those cinnamon sticks that you can get if you insist on having dessert at Taco Bell. After all, starch plus sugar plus cinnamon isn't that weird a concept, and potatoes are basically starch, right?
Well, yuk. These basically tasted like the usual Ore-Ida frozen french fries, with that classic crunchy-fry taste, except that they were missing the salt and tasted kind of weird. They weren't very sweet, and they had hardly any noticeble spice at all. I'm not sure if they are having trouble getting the sugar stuff to adhere, or if this was actually the product design. I'm not anxious to try the cocoa-flavored ones or the bright blue ones that were also launched in this product line.
Loco Lime Soda with a Hot Streak : B-
I picked this up at the Gourmet Garage on the Upper West Side last Friday evening. It reminded me of a product prototype I did back in my Pepsi days, a chili-lime cola I was trying to push as a Taco Bell tie-in. It's being produced by a tiny NYC company, and it's got all of the hallmarks of a self-published “premium” food product: undersized bottles at high prices (7 oz for $1.89), funky hand drawn graphics, nutritional label that doesn't have the numbers rounded correctly, and that you just *know* was based on a single nutritional analysis (123 calories, huh?), and statements like “Real Lime Juice” and “Extract of Real Chilis” on the ingredient line, which aren't quite legal. No preservatives, pulp or solids fallout or something on the bottom. They're tunnel pasteurizing it at a brewery, I'd guess; that plus cheap concentrates is probably why it's got a distinctly cooked citrus taste. The chili burn was moderate enough to leave the product drinkable for the whole seven ounces, but to leave a bit of heat behind. Not a lot of actual chili flavor, though. I can't imagine they'll have any sustainable success, and I'm sure I could do better, but still, not a terrible entry into the market. It rules over Pepsi Blue, anyway.
Pirate's Booty with Caramel : A
Robert's American Gourmet, the makers of the all natural upscale cheez doodles called Pirate's Booty, the dredged up from the bottom of the sea version called Veggie Booty, and the strange peace-love-and-flower-extract Personality Puffs, has launched a sweet product. It's basically their corn and rice extruded mix, flavored with a light caramel coating, like caramel corn. There's enough coating to give a satisfying crunch, but it isn't overly sweet. Both the corn and rice flavors are clear under the sweetness. In the family of snack foods, this snack is the hippie cousin of Captain Crunch, Cracker Jack, and Sugar Corn Pops. I can only hope that they have enough success to produce single serving bags of this one. I found it very addictive, and ate about 2 of the 5 servings in the bag on the 10-minute car ride between the grocery store and my house.
Ore-Ida Funky Fries, Cinna-Stiks cinnamon and sugar potatoes: D
I was very dubious about this product concept. Do we really need to entice our children to eat products like french fries by putting sugar on them? Then again, I was put in mind of foods like the Mexican sopapillas or at least those cinnamon sticks that you can get if you insist on having dessert at Taco Bell. After all, starch plus sugar plus cinnamon isn't that weird a concept, and potatoes are basically starch, right?
Well, yuk. These basically tasted like the usual Ore-Ida frozen french fries, with that classic crunchy-fry taste, except that they were missing the salt and tasted kind of weird. They weren't very sweet, and they had hardly any noticeble spice at all. I'm not sure if they are having trouble getting the sugar stuff to adhere, or if this was actually the product design. I'm not anxious to try the cocoa-flavored ones or the bright blue ones that were also launched in this product line.
Loco Lime Soda with a Hot Streak : B-
I picked this up at the Gourmet Garage on the Upper West Side last Friday evening. It reminded me of a product prototype I did back in my Pepsi days, a chili-lime cola I was trying to push as a Taco Bell tie-in. It's being produced by a tiny NYC company, and it's got all of the hallmarks of a self-published “premium” food product: undersized bottles at high prices (7 oz for $1.89), funky hand drawn graphics, nutritional label that doesn't have the numbers rounded correctly, and that you just *know* was based on a single nutritional analysis (123 calories, huh?), and statements like “Real Lime Juice” and “Extract of Real Chilis” on the ingredient line, which aren't quite legal. No preservatives, pulp or solids fallout or something on the bottom. They're tunnel pasteurizing it at a brewery, I'd guess; that plus cheap concentrates is probably why it's got a distinctly cooked citrus taste. The chili burn was moderate enough to leave the product drinkable for the whole seven ounces, but to leave a bit of heat behind. Not a lot of actual chili flavor, though. I can't imagine they'll have any sustainable success, and I'm sure I could do better, but still, not a terrible entry into the market. It rules over Pepsi Blue, anyway.
