Reviews

Auriganic is a 100 percent juice beverage that features auricularia auricula (aka wood ear -- an edible fungus). While we appreciate the functional ingredient in this product, we’re not convinced that this is the right approach.

A couple months ago, Talking Rain announced the launch of a new package option for its popular Sparkling ICE brand. The new 8 oz. slim cans have an upscale look, as compared to the brand's PET bottles, and we're quite impressed with the execution in design.

Guru recently added a line of organic, zero-calorie, and sparkling "energy waters" to its portfolio of energy drinks. The new products are sweetened with erythritol and stevia, something we question for beverages that are marketed as "waters."

Earlier this year, Honest Tea announced the addition of two unsweetened and caffeine-free herbal varieties to its line of glass bottled iced teas. For, us Honest's Cinnamon Sunrise Herbal Tea and Ginger Oasis Herbal Tea are excellent examples of how producers can make highly flavorful teas without the use of sweeteners.

In package design and marketing, the Bomb brand has been interpreted in a literal sense, with a mushroom cloud motif. This, more than anything else, feels like a really bad approach in that it will certainly relegate this product to being viewed as a novelty product.

Coca-Cola-owned Zico has a new watermelon raspberry variety, a from concentrate coconut water product intended attract more mainstream consumers to the brand.

Juisi is a line of cold-pressed and high pressure processed juices and non-dairy milks and sold in six markets along the East Coast. Sampling three Juisi blends, we were pleased with the formulation of each, but feel that the branding and labels need some refinement to really pop.

Passion House Coffee Roasters is a specialty coffee roaster based in Chicago. The company's approach is a bit different than other roasters in that it offers three “genres” of coffee: Ambient, Mainstream, and Experimental.

DailyServing takes a novel approach to food and beverage, combining an approximately 4 oz. serving of juice with an identically sized snack. The juice, which is cold-pressed and HPP, is the more compelling part of the offering (maybe that’s just our jaded perspective as beverage folks).

TruBrain is a unique product that was designed to offer consumers cognitive and energy benefits as a way to provide what it describes as “genuine focus” to users. It sounds like a very lofty goal, but fortunately the folks behind this are a team of UCLA-trained neuroscientists.

A line of green teas infused with mushroom extracts, Mudra Mushroom is certainly one of the more unique ready-to-drink tea brands on the market. All in all, we like the notion of a functional mushroom tea, but we feel as though the company needs to do more for the brand to really stand out to a broader audience.

From our perspective, Joni Juice produces some of the better cold-pressed juices and smoothies that we've sampled. Yet while we really like the formulation of the products, there’s a bigger opportunity for the brand if its package design was given an overhaul.

Green Mustache has made a number of updates to its brand of kid-focused juice smoothies, which are blended with nutritionally dense ingredients like chia and kale. The beverages are now high pressure processed and packaged in a 12 oz. cylindrical bottle. Green Mustache has also added a couple new flavor varieties to its lineup

Bluewater Farms' Cranberry Juice is the flagship product in the company's line of cranberry-based beverages. While it’s tastier than many shelf-stable alternatives out there, we think there needs to be more done to make it a compelling product.