AriZona Lets Facebook Fans Vote on New Flavor; BevNET TV’s First Taste Sampling

In celebration of their 20 year anniversary, AriZona is offering the chance for their fans to vote — via Facebook — on one of three new flavor concepts that they’ve created.

Since it would be impossible to have every fan that votes try the flavor samples (and what fun would it really be to just vote based on the name of a flavor?), AriZona asked a variety of people, including food writers, celebrity chefs, random consumers on the streets of New York, and yours truly, to work as “Flavor Panelists.”   Our task? Try the flavors and help AriZona’s Facebook fans make a slightly more informed decision. In return, AriZona would feature these reviews on its Facebook page (key takeaway: we didn’t take money to do this).

As someone who loves trying every last product that has ever been cooked up by a flavor company, I had to agree.  However, this situation was a bit unique.  While we sample pre-production flavors all the time to help beverage companies, this was the first time that we’ve specifically been asked to publish our thoughts on them. Still, my sense of morbid curiosity made me agree to go along for the ride.

We had to make things different from how a “BevNET Review” normally works, since that’s a top-secret, proprietary process. This time, we decided to do the tasting on video.  And since I didn’t want to do this alone, I enlisted my regular BevNET TV partner, Andrew Guard.  What you’ll see in the video below is our first taste of the products — we did not try these before the cameras were rolling.

The flavor samples were created by the same flavor house that creates AriZona’s other flavors (we’ll spare their name, but when you see the bottles you’ll probably know who made them).  What’s particularly interesting about these flavors is that none of them are tea.  Instead, they are what we’d describe as nostalgic soda flavors (despite one of them being non-carbonated).

Watch the video to see our sampling and to find out which one we thought was the best…