Reviews

There's a lot to like about Rebel Kitchen's two-SKU line of coconut milk blends. The question is, has the company done enough to round out what is, for most consumers, an acquired taste for coconut milk?

Red Thread Good markets a line of USDA organic and fair trade cold-brewed coffees that come in both ready-to-drink and concentrated varieties. In our review of the brand's Purist and Dreamy products, we think the company has done well with formulation, but the product’s logo could use a bit of refinement.

Earlier this year, Forager launched a new line of 28 oz. multi-serve nut milks that, like all Forager products, are made with organic ingredients and high pressure processed. From our perspective, these are some of the best tasting nut milks that we’ve sampled.

With a "shot" of dry ingredients including toasted oats, chia seeds, almonds and honey, wrapped around the neck of its 11 oz. bottle, Slingshot offers a unique take on the traditional yogurt drink.

This flavor of Reed’s Culture Club Kombucha is made with water, sugar, oolong tea, yerba mate, organic coffee and kombucha culture. From a taste perspective, the combination of the tea, coffee, and a slightly vinegary flavor isn’t quite something that we’d naturally gravitate towards, but it works.

Formerly known as Life Force Juice, Jubali is a line of organic and cold-pressed juices and smoothies. Featuring a number of playfully named and rather unique formulations, Jubali has done a nice job with its juice blends. As for the packaging, we think there's some room for improvement.

In the traditional sense, “Half & Half” is a blend of equal parts iced tea and lemonade. Red Jacket’s riff on this breaks from this playbook a bit, blending guayusa tea, lemonade and apple juice to create this product, Joe’s Clean Half & Half.

Soylent’s ready to drink “version 1.3” (released at the end of 2014) is a powdered nutritional shake mix that is the commercialized version of the do-it-yourself recipe (which can be found on the Internet), and designed to satisfy all nutritional requirements that the human body needs.

Califia Farms, which had previously produced only ready-to-drink coffees, has officially jumped into the cold brew coffee concentrate category with this product. The key selling point of this multi-serve beverage is, much like other cold brew products, its low acidity level, which Califia touts as being 60 percent lower than hot brewed coffee.

Velu is a beverage that’s focused on a classic ingredient for juice bars: wheatgrass. It’s one of those under-loved ingredients that is generally consumed -- many times in shot form -- purely for health purposes rather than flavor. That’s what Velu is setting out to change with its flagship product.

Packaged in 1.7 oz. plastic containers, KOR is a line of organic, high pressure processed (HPP) juice shots that come in two varieties: Ginger and Turmeric. While the small format makes it intuitive that the product is a shot, it's both a challenge and a potential opportunity for the brand in that it’s not fighting for the same shelf space that’s currently taken up by HPP juices.

Mansi is a straightforward blend of water, calamansi juice, sugar, honey and ascorbic acid. If you haven’t had calamansi before, it’s basically a citrus fruit that has a flavor profile that’s very close to lemon. That being said, the flavor of this product is basically that of a slightly exotic lemonade. So really, anyone could pick up a carton of Mansi and enjoy it. It is, however, quite sweet.

A couple weeks ago, Daily Greens unveiled a brand extension called Half Pint, which is a three-SKU line of 8 oz. cold-pressed juice blends designed for kids. It's an interesting move for the green juice-focused brand, and, from our perspective, well-executed in terms of package and formulation.

Ripe Craft Juice is a new line of cold-pressed, high pressure processed juices launched by FreshBev, which is best known for its Ripe Craft Bar Juice cocktail mixers. FreshBev has partnered with Ocean Spray to source fruit for the line, which debuted with two cranberry varieties and a red grapefruit juice.