Reviews

Amid its sprawling booth at the recently held Natural Products Expo West, Califia Farms sampled new single-serve varieties of its Iced Coffee line. Made with a blend of almond milk and coffee, the line comes in three flavors: Salted Caramel, Cocoa Noir and XX Espresso. From our perspective, Califia has once again proven adept at creating great tasting formulations with reasonable sugar and calorie content.

Bucha’s Yuzu Lemon flavored kombucha is the latest addition to the company's line of USDA Organic certified beverages. From a flavor perspective, it’s quite mild and it lacks the vinegar like flavor that you’ll find in many other kombucha products. Instead, it has a flavor that’s better described as a carbonated tea.

Last year, Live Soda Kombucha underwent a very well-designed and well-executed rebranding, landing the company a BevNET Best of 2013 award for Best Product Revamp. Recently, Live Soda added two new flavors, Orange Cream and Sparkling Ginger, that build upon the company's efforts to reach out to broad range of consumers in both natural and mainstream.

First introduced at the 2014 Winter Fancy Food Show, Purity Organic’s Chocolate Coconut Water follows the same style of the company’s other offerings, both in flavor and packaging, starting with…

Sourced from maple sap, but unlike maple syrup, not cooked down into a concentrated form, maple waters have gained some buzz in recent months with a steadily increasing number of brands entering the market. Seva Maple Water is one such brand. With a very light maple flavor, it’s definitely a palatable product and one that is thirst-quenching. But is that enough of a reason to drink this beverage?

Based in San Francisco, Forager Project is a company that produces a range of organic, cold-pressed juices. Marketed as "fast slow food," the brand includes four sublines -- Greens, Nuts, Roots and Cleanse -- with two to four juices in each line. While we enjoyed the formulation of the drinks that we sampled, the naming convention for the juices, differentiated by the name of the subline and a letter (i.e. "Greens A" and "Nuts B") could be improved upon.

Vita Coco’s Lemonade variety is a not-from-concentrate coconut water that is perhaps the company's most mainstream offering to date. Blending lemon puree, which has a pretty assertive flavor, with coconut water and fruit sugar results in something that tastes much more like lemonade than coconut water. To that end, consumers don't necessarily need to care for lemonade to enjoy this product.

Last year, TYR, a sportswear manufacturer, launched TYR Endurance Sport drinks. The company has certainly put out a very professional looking first effort, with a formulation that includes EMIQ (a form of quercetin), carbohydrate complex, caffeine and EGCG, and Ace-K and sugar as its sweeteners. From a taste perspective, the products are very drinkable, but the packaging will need some work for this brand to make its mark.

Kombucha Wonder Drink's "Raw" line comes in three varieties each containing 13 calories and 2 grams of sugar per 11 oz. bottle. While the beverages have a slightly sour note to them, rather that the vinegary taste associated with most kombucha drinks, the products have a mellow flavor and are quite drinkable. If we have any criticism, it's for the labels, but overall, this is a great line.

Fortified with chia seed oil, rather than seeds or ground chia, Xiomega Seedless Chia Water has no detectable taste of chia.This could be opportunity for the company, in that some consumers dislike the texture of some some chia drinks. However, we do wonder about Xiomega's use of agave as a sweetener and think that the label for these products definitely needs an upgrade.

Launched in January, Essentials is Suja’s third line of organic, HPP juices and designed to be a more mainstream offering than its other lines. The launch comes with a subtle…

drinkme, which markets a line of "cold blended" and high pressure processed juices and smoothies, recently updated its packaging and moved into a new 15.2 oz. round-edged bottle. While the company had done well with the formulation of the products, we’re still left feeling as though the company could do more with the label.

Mastiqua is a sparkling mineral water flavored with mastiha, "a world-renowned natural resin from the Mediterranean island of Chios," according to the supplier. For most people out there, that really will give no indication as to the taste of this product, which has a flavor that is almost like a light birch or sarsaparilla flavor with a mint finish. While we do like what's inside the bottle, we think that the branding, which is very heavy on its Greek origins, is not the best way to position it.

More varieties of Daily Greens means more green juice -- and once again, we like what the company has formulated in the three additional varieties that we sampled for this review. From a hemp milk-based beverage to a juice blended with carrot and tumeric, we like the way that the company has offered consumers a bit of differentiation from competing products.