Runa Guayusa: Sweet Peach

Like its Half & Half and Raspberry siblings, Runa’s Sweet Peach is what appears to be the company's take on a mainstream peach-flavored iced tea. This is pretty obvious from the second you lay your eyes on the bottle, which features a cleaned up and more polished looking front panel than past efforts. “Sweet Peach” and peach graphics immediately catch your eye as does the Runa logo. What’s interesting is that you won’t find the word “tea” on the front panel. Instead, this and their more recent efforts have forgone including this descriptor and instead are focused on it being “clean energy” and “powered by guayusa.” Whether or not this matters, we don’t know, especially since the color of the liquid and the flavor name give the consumer some hints that this is a tea-like product. That, compared with the fruit images, definitely helps the product appeal to your senses. Our only other comment on the packaging is that we would like to see the caffeine content described in more specifics than currently is (it compares it to a cup of coffee). As for the liquid that’s inside the bottle, it, too, tastes very similar to a traditional ready-to-drink peach-flavored iced tea. While we were slightly disappointed to see that this particular flavor doesn’t use any juice, the peach flavor is pleasant and Runa has sweetened it with a modest amount of cane sugar (16g per bottle). The flavor might not be as unique as some of the company's past efforts, but it certainly feels like something that could appeal to a very broad audience. Overall, we very much like the idea of having traditional tea flavors in the Runa lineup, and the execution of this flavor is quite enjoyable.